Herbal Medicines and Their Effectiveness

Many people believe herbal remedies are little more than snake oil. They tried such and such remedy themselves and it didn’t do a thing for them so it must be a crock. Well believe it or not, this does actually happen.

One herbal remedy that does wonders in helping some people, might not seem to do a thing for other people. It’s the same thing with prescription and over the counter medications too if you think about it. Some people will have adverse reactions to a drug when everybody else seems to take it with no problems. Sometimes those “rare” side effects on warning labels will actually happen for some people.

And that’s because everybody is different. Our bodies respond differently to a variety of things. And there are many things our bodies might be allergic to, or simply things our bodies disagree with for one reason or another, that we’re unaware of.

One of the biggest reasons some people see no results when taking herbal medications however, is often due to what’s known as “user error”. If you decide that you have X or Y illness, and procede to go about treating that particular problem, you won’t usually have much success if you have misdiagnosed yourself. It’s like trying to take cough medicine to try and bring down your fever. It won’t usually work, because cough medicine is not made to reduce fevers.

The same basic concepts apply with herbal remedies and medications too. If you don’t know enough about what your condition is, you’ll find yourself having a very difficult time treating it properly.

An excellent example is kidney stones. In most cases, kidney stones can be treated naturally with lemon juice. This won’t work for everyone though, because there are actually four different types of kidney stones.

The most common type of kidney stone is a calcium stone – about 80% of people who get kidney stones get this type, and the lemon juice works wonderfully to dissolve these types of stones. If however, you have kidney stones that are one of the other three type, the lemon juice remedy may not work for you at all.

Still other types of herbal remedies will work on a particular condition, just not nearly as well as another herb would. There are also many times people have been misinformed about what a particular herbal remedy will do. Echinacea is an excellent example of this problem. Echinacea has become a very popular herb to take for colds. People seem to think however, that the herb will cure their cold, or prevent them from getting one in the first place. And this is actually untrue.

Echinacea is a wonderful herb with antibiotic properties, and it does a great job at fighting infections. It specializes in glandular infections and problems though, which makes it especially effective for strep throat, or other types of infections which give you swollen glands. It will not normally cure a common cold. It can however, reduce the severity of your cold symptoms, but it won’t actually cure it or prevent it from coming on. So people take Echinacea thinking they’re not going to catch a cold, or they’re curing the cold they have, then complain that herbal remedies don’t work.