ST JOHNS WORT

CHAMOMILE

VERVAIN

LAVENDER

VALERIAN

MINT

PASSIONFLOWER

Poppy

MARIGOLD

ROSE

ELDER

Things always happen in threes so they say. Last week someone asked me if I had red rice yeast, which i did not, nor had I ever heard of it. A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me how to treat high cholesterol, I then saw an advert for red rice yeast, and then at a conference I saw a relatively new company who were manufacturing and selling medicinal mushroom products which included red rice yeast. So things come in fours not threes.

High cholesterol levels are not uncommon and in the conventional medical world the upper limit for normal cholesterol, that is the level at which treatment is recommended has dropped over the years. It is also lower for patients with other cardiovascular risk factors like diabetes or family history of heart disease. The commonest treatment is dietary, but this can only affect 10% as the other 90% is manufactured by the body. A group of medicines called statins are widely used to reduce the body’s production of cholesterol. However these have some significant side effects, the most common is unpleasant muscle pain or myalgia which rarely turns into something far more serious.
The conventional herbal answer is to use globe artichoke leaf (Cyanara scolymus) plus other live herbs to aid excretion of cholesterol into the bile. But even before that you would be looking at dietary change. Cholesterol is found only in animal food stuffs (including dairy and shellfish), so the simple answer is more vegetables, and less meat, environmentally sound advice too. Regular moderate exercise for an hour a day eg dog walking has a proven effect too.

A little snippet in New Scientist, I found interesting, Turmeric’s (Curcuma longa) most active constituent Curcumin is being investigated for its potential to protect from bowel cancer. Watch this space!

A couple of patients have asked me recently about thyroid disease and if there are any herbs which might help. Often the results of blood tests run by GPs to monitor thyroid function do not quite match up to the patients symtoms, so the patient feels he/she is having too much or too little thyroxine, but the test show the thyroid hormone level to be normal. So is there anything to help? Well yes!
For an overactive thyroid the herbs which are used are bugle weed (Lycopus europeaus) and lemonbalm (Melissa officinalis). there is only test-tube or animal testing to support the use of these herbs, but those results were positive.
Until very recently I did not think there was anything to help an underactive thyroid besides using kelp/ bladderwrack (Fucus vesiculosus) to increase iodine intake plus selenium (enough in about 6 brazil nuts a day) so the thyroid had enough substrate to work on if the body were short of these elements. A colleague of mine suggested Guggul (Commiphora mukul) which is related to Myrrh.The only human study I found for guggul showed against placebo, that it reduces both cholesterol and triglycerides by 10-12%. It is interesting to note that in thyroid disease (hyper or hypo) that blood lipids are raised.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN HERBAL MEDICINE?

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