Although I completely empathize with those who want to turn away from a pharmaceutical industry that relentlessly markets drugs as panaceas and goes so far as to create “illnesses” almost out of thin air in order to market drugs to cure them, the reaction of embracing everything marketed as “natural” or “herbal” is misguided.
Isaac Newton (via his Third Law—a bit paraphrased) and others remind us that anything that has the possibility of helping us can also harm us. Merely being “natural” confers no inherent safety. That means that herbal treatments, acupuncture, homeopathic remedies, and anything else that can claim to be “all natural” is not guaranteed to be free of side effects. I’ve seen people made anxious and irritable by herbal treatments and people wind up in psychiatric emergency rooms after receiving acupuncture treatments. (Just to make sure the allopathic folks aren’t gloating right now: I’ve seen as much and worse in folks who’ve taken psychiatric medications.)
Still clinging to the notion that being natural means being safe? Our two biggest killers, tobacco and alcohol, are in and of themselves perfectly natural substances.
Not only are they not inherently safe, but natural treatments aren’t necessarily efficacious. Therefore to claim, as some have, that because many herbal treatments are centuries old their efficacy is obvious, is specious. Slavery and the oppression of women—to name just a couple of centuries old traditions–also have been around for eons but that certainly doesn’t mean that they are correct, true, ought to be embraced, or are beyond scrutiny.