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Phytotherapy is the main part of the comprehensive field of herbal medicine, which is based on phytochemistry, phytopharmacy,and phytopharmacology.
Phytochemistry Phytochemistry exclusively studies the ingredients (chemical defined secondary products) in plants. Its mission is to identify the chemical composition of plants,verify or control its fingerprint and describe potential ingredients that can be examined pharmacologically for its effects. The view of phytochemistry is focused solely on the parts and not the whole. Phytochemistry provides the impulse to examine active ingredients for their potential to be synthesized in order to become independent from harvesting in nature.
Phytopharmacy Phytopharmacy focuses on the drug that provides the basis for an herbal medicinal product and its dosage forms, for example in teas or in various forms of pharmaceutically prepared extracts and products.
Pharmacognosy Pharmacognosy or the identification of a drug through visual inspection,is an important part of phytopharmacy. In the past, pharmacognosists identified plants by looking at, touching, tasting and smelling the plant. This approach to identifying and determining the quality of a medicinal plant can still be important. However, in the meantime,highly specialized physiochemical analysis methods are the preferred method of identifying drugs. Now it is not unusual for a pharmacist to know and be able to differentiate the entire fingerprint of a medicinal herb.
Phytotherapy Phytotherapy describes the possibilities and limitations of using medicinal plants or products made from to treat indications in human medicine. It belongs primarily into the hands of physicians or other therapists,who are specialized on herbal medicine. Many phytopharmaceuticals are also suited for self medication, especially in a preventive sense.Typically phytotherapy is mostly focused on chronic diseases and not directly on acute problems.
Most representatives of modern phytotherapy view it as part of science based (mainstream) medicine. The aspiration to apply the same scientific methods to phytotherapeutics as to synthetic drugs and to view phytotherapy as an integral component of modern pharmacotherapy deserves to be supported. In this context, it should be mentioned that phytotherapy, unlike homeopathy and anthroposophical medicine,does not rely on its own epistemology or scientific method. It has been and continues to be a natural science in the truest sense of the word, although in the past, it was viewed in a more comprehensive context than today. The majority of its applications is derived from centuries or even millennia of experience with medicinal herbs.
One special aspect of phytotherapy is its broad spectrum of indication areas. The medical use of the whole plant or “whole” parts of the plant, special mixtures derived through extraction or isolated single components all involve specialization that ranges from comprehensive therapeutic efficacy to pharmacologically definable effect. The more ingredients contained in a phytotherapeutic, the broader its indication area can be. The therapeutic effect of polychemical(multicomponent) mixtures is broader than that of certain ingredients in a standardized extract or of a defined monosubstance, usually in the form of a synthetic derivative. This gradation creates a multitude of indication possibilities especially for phytopharmaceuticals for the treating physician.
Any type of ideology that says that only holistic models provide healing is just an one sided opinion and needs to be questioned as the dominant view today that verifiable therapeutic results can only be achieved with chemically defined single substances.
Opponents of herbal medicine often maintain that these medicines are only suitable for improving a state of disorder or discomfort.The denigration implied here shows the inability of these scientists to understand the reality of a person who is ill. Against a backdrop of ideological one-sidedness, the increasingly dogmatic field of medical science has constructed abstract assessments of therapies oriented solely towards objectively provable findings. In their daily practice, however, physicians continuously observe that people who are ill, experience and suffer their discomfort much more directly than their pathological findings or diagnosis.However, modern medicine has managed to get more and more patients to fixate on their findings or pathologies. They judge the value of therapy by these findings and seek out a different physician for alleviation of their discomfort or lack of well-being.
However, there is no doubt that everyone who is ill seeks to regain their health in both areas:finding as well as feeling. Strangely, scientific medicine has long criticized “cosmetic diagnostics”.For example, it has been shown that treatment of chronic hepatitis with glucocorticosteroids produced dramatic improvements in transaminase levels. However, histological assessments have shown that actual disease progression and chronic destructive inflammation of the liver not only did not improve, but often worsened dramatically during therapy. This was referred to as the “whitewash effect”. It led to cortisone therapy for chronic hepatitis becoming obsolete.
European Traditional Medicine seems to primarily work in areas where the human organism experiences well-being that changes into discomfort as a result of disease. Well being is an expression of overall, holistic sense of health, ideally a sense of wellness. Feelings of comfort or discomfort, on the other hand,are an expression of individual symptoms, for example, localized pain, sense of bloating in the upper abdomen, discomfort in the extremities or dysuria. The objectifiable level of findings or diagnostics is created by analytical thinking that starts with the whole and breaks it down into parts. It seeks to derive its knowledge from ever greater differentiation. Assessing feelings of discomfort requires synthesizing thinking that directs the focus from symptoms as an expression of holistic beings to the whole being.The world of feelings of comfort or discomfort is an expression of the subjectiveness of the individual and is generally not provable. It can only be described and understood. Some disorders are entirely dominated by findings and show no symptoms or feelings of discomfort,such as hypertonicity or hypercholesteremia.Other disorders are entirely within the realm of feelings of discomfort, without the possibility of objectifiable diagnosis, for example, migraines.Both nosological units of a disease process cannot be differentiated according to which is more “correct”, worthy of recognition or exists in a scientific sense. Disorders that combine discomfort and pathological findings are even more frequent.
Physicians practicing phytotherapy are often excited to observe that improvements on a diagnostic level do not coincide with primary improvements in well-being, but do tend towards normalization after a significant delay.
The worlds of finding and feeling exist in parallel and require different therapeutics,depending on which side of the disorder is dominant. Some disorders require treatment exclusively with synthetics. Some are only treatable with phytotherapeutics. Other disorders require both types of therapy and these therapies are complementary. This results in the following four categories, illustrated in Table 3–1.
Table 3–1 Therapeutic Categories for Phytotherapeutics (According to Fintelmann, et al [1] )
The holistic human being is characterized by the levels of finding and feeling as well as the criteria mood and presence of mind. Findings indicate pathologies in the physiochemical dimension of the body. Feeling is an expression of the body’s functionality. Mood describes the psychosomatic level, the unity of body and soul. Today, the words“psyche” and “psychogenic” tend to be used rather loosely. Much of what is labeled with these terms is derived from the level of functionality or life, not directly from the connections between body and soul. These are holistically expressed in a wide range of moods. The fact that modern medicine is or at least was conscious of this fact can be deduced from the pathologically oriented use of the term “mood disorders”.
Objective accessible areas of this psychosomatic dimension can primarily be found in endocrinology and immunology.Psycho-neuro-immunology is a scientifically accepted specialty and no physician, no matter how scientifically oriented, will be able to deny the high percentage of psychologic symptoms associated with endocrine disorders.