July Book of the Month – Grow your own Drugs

Everyone is interested in living healthily and making the most of what we have to hand. The use of plants for health and beauty is a practice as old as time. A bit of an overstatement perhaps but only slightly.
It’s hard to believe now when we’re used to popping pharmaceuticals which are produced on an industrial scale by some of the richest companies in the world but for the vast majority of human history plants and plant preparations were among the only medicines available.
Herbal medicine can be broadly classified into four basic traditions as follows:- Traditional Chinese Herbalism, Ayurvedic Herbalism, Western Herbalism and Arab traditional medicine. Each of these traditions can trace their history back over hundreds and in some cases thousands of years.
The Romans and Greeks assimilated knowledge of herbal matters as well.

Hippocrates often labelled the father of modern medicine was a herbalist and is widely quoted as saying “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food”.

There’s scarcely a culture worldwide which doesn’t have a tradition of using herbal medicine. So it’s important to make sure that the knowledge of the power of plants isn’t just forgotten or dismissed as folk medicine. Unfortunately the current financial climate means it is harder for institutions especially in complementary or non-mainstream medicine or therapies to stay afloat. The latest casualty is The Scottish School of Herbal Medicine which has had to close down it’s degree programme and now only offers a Correspondence course. Hopefully it will be able to restart operations when the financial climate improves.
So I’m looking forward to learning something new with James Wong’s book. Who knows I might even get out into the garden and try my hand.

Tagged as: July Book of the Month