In this documentary, Professor Kathy Sykes from Bristol University takes a new look at herbs and interrogates whether they have the healing powers that they have been believed to possess for a long time. At the beginning of the film we see a baby called Isha Mistri. She was born with eczema. Her condition has been getting worse as she grows older-it has covered her entire body skin. Her mother is tending to her. She rubs her itching body to ease her of the pain. It is evidently unbearable on the small girl. To control the itching she is dressed with special clothes that cover her entire body. Her parents have tried conventional medicine to no avail. Her father informs this documentary that her daughter’s condition has been traumatic for their family. He says they have abandoned conventional medicine and are now trying herbs in the hope that it works out.
As Prof Kathy reports in this documentary, herbal medicine is the fastest growing alternative medicine in Britain today, a 100 million pound a year business industry. The demand is so high that there are herbalists on virtually every street. She shows us into one street where there are operating herbalists from Japan, India, China and Tibet, all working alongside each other, each of them using nearly the same herbs in different ways. Kathy interviews an herbalist on the street. She is making a decoction for the digestive system using ginseng-one of the most popular Chinese herbal remedies, mixed with a fungus. There is a baffling array of practitioners and just as much if not more herbs and the practitioners claim to treat everything from acne to smoking.
Yet some people claim herbs have changed their lives. Prof Kathy introduces Mr. Michael Campbell in the documentary. He has suffered from crippling leg pains. As he reports, he would walk four hundred yards, take a 5 minutes break before he could proceed another 400 yards. Michael a central heating engineer was diagnosed with a dangerous circulation condition called intermittent claudication. The normal remedy is a surgery which Michael was not willing to take after having bad experiences with surgeries before; he tried ginkgo and can now walk for 4 hours. As Prof Kathy says in this documentary, one person’s testimony isn’t proof of medicinal properties. She puts herbal medicines to the tests. She begins at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew where she examines old texts on herbal medicine dating 5000 years ago. She displays a number of herbs, used as ancient medicine which scientists are still investigating.
Kathy interviews Simon Mills an herbalist. He shows this documentary a number of herbs that are used for a variety of conditions-the male foil used for fever management, the agrimony, whose roots calms an agitated digestive system and the lanceolata, which yields mucus for lining the digestive tract. The fact that herbs contain medicinal compounds is universally accepted. But herbalists claim more than that; that herbs can be powerful medicines all by themselves. Kathy looks into these claims. She interviews Simon Mills of Exeter University in the documentary to find out how an herbalist treats and how that is different from conventional medicine. She describes a few symptoms to him as he notes them down. He then examines her pulse and checks the condition of her tongue. Weirdly, his diagnosis of Kathy is “hot” to mean she is very active, and “damp” to mean she is prone to illness. Simon says he categorizes people into personality types which help him to know which herbs to prescribe for each person. Kathy is concerned that the notion of personality types is not based on any scientific facts but is attracted to the personalized treatment approach. She agrees in the documentary that our bodies are extremely different and maybe a personalized treatment plan makes a difference.
She goes to South Africa-a place where herbs are claimed to work so well to find out if this is true. Here there is a long tradition of herbal treatment. Conventional medicine is beyond the reach of most people and herbal medicine is all they have. In the documentary, a man shows Kathy a variety of herbal remedies on display. There is the “live-long” used to relieve asthma and TB. Then there is the African potato, which relieves ulcers. But the Sutherlandia stands out. Kathy travels along the east coast of South Africa in Kwa Zulu Natal to interview a woman who claims the Sutherlandia has intriguing properties. Ann Hatchings, a medical researcher and herbal practitioner began using Sutherlandia to treat HIV patient in recent years and she claims it is working. In the documentary Ann attends to Nohlahla a woman who has had AIDS for 11 years. Ann began treating her with Sutherlandia 6 years ago. She says Sutherlandia helps her to relieve pain and boosts her appetite. Ann has treated over 800 patients with the herb and over 50% have greatly improved. She says Sutherlandia even boosts the immune system. In some instances blood tests have confirmed the white blood cell count to improve by as much as double, getting to near normal levels. Ann tells this documentary that sutherlandia has lengthened the lives of her patients and improved the quality of life for them.
Kathy visits a local AIDS hospice; the Holy Cross Hospice in Kwa Zulu Natal where patients are brought to die. In the documentary, we are shown an AIDS patient who was brought into the hospice 4 days earlier. The nurse in charge says just after 4 days of sutherlandia she has greatly improved. Since they began to put their patients on sutherlandia, 50% of them get up and return to work after treatment despite the fact that they are brought to the facility after being rejected by hospitals. Kathy’s trip to South Africa made her realize that for some people herbal medicine is not just fashion, it makes the difference between life and death.
Kathy speaks to Dr. Vivian Nathanson from the British Medical Association who informs this documentary that besides anecdotal evidence; there is limited scientific proof of the potential of herbal drugs which is what worries Kathy as do most western-trained scientists. She says that proof is much needed because if an herb is potentially effective it’s also potentially dangerous. Next, Kathy visits Germany where historically, modern medicine has existed alongside herbal drugs. In Germany, the second most popular drug after aspirin is the ginkgo herb. Here, as Kathy narrates in the documentary, most general practitioners are trained on herbal medicine and they actually incorporate herbs in their prescriptions. This practice dates back to the 19th century. The Nazi in search of health remedies for Germans saw the potential, of herbs as a medicine for all common people and put its production into mainstream medicine. Although the contribution of the Nazis to herbal medicine in Germany is controversial today, the fascination with herbs lives on. The health ministry even provides a monograph on the effectiveness and uses of herbal drugs also seen in this documentary-a product of 20 years of research leading to the approval of 191 herbs of the 300 that were studied. This is probably the most elaborate monograph on herbs ever put together. Kathy’s problem with the monograph is that it makes references only to anecdotal and historical evidence, never quite scientific.
Kathy visits a state of the art lab where she shows this documentary how the Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) technique is being used by scientists to separate out the components of herbal drugs. She uses TLC to separate the chemical components of ginkgo. The results show that one of the components is gingkaloids, which have shown ability to prevent clotting and are only found in gingko. She agrees herbs actually have medicinal value but it doesn’t mean they are in a form that can be absorbed by the body. To answer that question, they need to be tested on people.
Jenny Miles a young mother of 2 seen in this documentary has suffered from depression for a long time. She says she took antidepressants for a long time but did not like them because they would take both her high and low moments leaving her miserable. As an alternative, she tried St. John’s Wort which she says has enabled her to manage her depression like never before. Experiences of this kind have prompted scientists to study the herb more closely. Dr. Stephan Koehler from Schwabe Pharmaceuticals explains that they started clinical trials for St. John’s Wort, a herb which contains heyperphorin believed to be active against depression 10 years ago. They recruited over 2000 participants some of whom were given standardized extracts of St. John’s Wort and the rest were given conventional antidepressants. They found that an incredible number of people were healed and did not encounter any relapses. In a recent study, over 50% of participants who were on St. John’s Wort reported major improvements. Those on conventional antidepressants reported side of effects which were not seen in the other group. Here is proof that an herbal drug not only works but does better than conventional medicine.
Kathy travels back to Leicester to meet Isha (the girl with eczema) on their third consultation with herbalist Serine Foster. Her condition is getting better slowly but surely. As we see in the documentary, Foster brews up a new drug with 6 herbs as well as a massage paste to help treat Isha’s eczema. Isha’s parents can only hope that this herbal remedies work. A lot more is known about herbs today than ever before, but to find out the effectiveness of these studies, Kathy speaks to Prof Edzard Ernst, UK’s first professor of herbal medicines. Prof. Ernst says he has confirmed that at least a dozen herbs actually do work. He mentions the St. Johns Wort for mild to average depression, the black cohosh which helps with the effects of menopause and the devil’s claw, an anti-inflammatory for joint pains. The Saw palmetto relieves enlarged prostrate. The Hawthorne can help with heart conditions. Garlic can reduce cholesterol and blood pressure. Horse chestnuts can help with symptoms associated with varicose veins. Gingko improves memory and brain function which is how it helped Michael Campbell with his cramping joints as seen earlier in the documentary. It also helps with tinnitus and might help reduce memory loss. These herbs have been confirmed to work through clinical trials just as rigorous as those for conventional drugs. Prof Ernst says in the documentary that he is convinced there are still hundreds of effective drugs in herbs that are yet to be discovered.
More intriguing beyond the fact that herbs work is how they actually work, which could provide an answer to some of the most chronic illnesses of the 21st Century. At the University of Johannesburg studies into the mode of action of sutherlandia have demonstrated impressive results that could help understand how other herbs work. Dr. Carl Albrecht says flavonoids isolated from sutherlandia have fascinated them-they have pharmacological activity against cancer and HIV. Flavonoids have extremely large molecular structures and are impossible to be absorbed by the human cells. Yet Dr. Albrecht tells this documentary that another group of compounds called saponins found in Sutherlandia can alter the structure of the cell membrane to allow the flavonoids to pass. What makes sutherlandia and most drugs exceptional is that unlike conventional drugs it’s a cocktail of compounds which act together with a better end result as opposed to conventional drugs which are mostly based on one compound. It’s a process that could be thought of as an orchestra with a synergy of several chemical compounds. This thought is still a mystery to many scientists but holds the key to understanding how herbs work.
At the London Imperial College, they are testing whether a cocktail of herbs can be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. James Warner, lead researcher shows this documentary MRI scanned images of the brain of a 60 year old with Alzheimer’s disease. It shows large black areas where brain tissue has died and accumulated fluid. Dr. Warner says one of the explanations fronted by doctors is that there may be free radicals attacking the brain tissue, causing Alzheimer’s or that a narrowing of the blood vessels supplying the brain denies the brain tissue of nutrients causing tissue death and hence Alzheimer’s.
The challenge of creating medicine that can tackle different causative factors at the same time like has made treatment of Alzheimer’s using conventional medicine impossible. Yet Dr. Warner says gingko might be able to deliver just that. Given that it has over 200 chemical compounds, it might have different effects in the body simultaneously. Dr. Warner tells this documentary that ginkgo dilates the blood vessels improving blood supply to the brain and possibly scavenges and destroys the free radicals which attack the nerve cells. Unlike most conventional drugs which mostly contain one compound and hence have one action, gingko has several compounds and therefore a variety of actions- more like a herbal shotgun that can hit a range of targets, something conventional medicine has not been able to create.
Dr. Warner is running what he hopes will be the ultimate clinical trial on ginkgo’s activity against Alzheimer’s, the results of which would be due in spring 2006, although initial results show that gingko works. He has recruited 200 volunteers suffering from different degrees of Alzheimer’s. Each is assessed and put on gingko or a dummy pill and they are re-assessed after 6 months. The results could mean that just like Alzheimer’s most chronic diseases of this century require a cocktail of components with a variety of simultaneous actions rather than single compounds with one mode of action. In this case herbs in all their complexity might just be the answer. Back in Leicester the Mistri’s are back to see the herbalist. Isha has been using her herbs for 6 months. The results are amazing. As we see in the documentary her skin has greatly cleared out. The itching is gone and she appears relaxed, happy and playful. This could probably be another classical case of how herbs could treat chronic illnesses.
Kathy notes as she closes this documentary that there surely are plenty of herbs which work. But the fact that they are effective means they could also be dangerous, in fact they could contain high level of toxins. This can only be confirmed through clinical trials much of which has not been done. This poses a threat to those who use unregulated herbs, and makes the basis for a requirement by the British authorities that any herbs which claim medicinal properties have to go through rigorous quality standards. This is perhaps the first step towards bridging the gap between herbs and conventional medicine- recognition that herbs might have something unique and quality to offer.