Alternative Medicine Part 2 - Herbal Medicine

This week I thought that we could continue with alternative medicine but specifically concentrate on Herbal medicine sites.   Patients must be coming to their providers with questions about herbs they are taking and herbs that they have heard they should take.   There is a large amount of misleading information on the Internet and the area of herbal medicine is no exception.   With this week’s newsletter I hope to help you to find reliable herbal information on the WWW.

In your evaluation of these sites you may want to refer to the list of evaluation criteria published by the National Library of Medicine.  If you forget what they are you can read them again at http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/gmr/publish/eval.html

Southwest School of Botanical Medicine
· Well respected private institution in field of herbal medicine
· Over 1500 indexed plant images
· 8 herbal manuals available as PDF files to download and print
· Full text of classic books from 19th and 20th century
http://chili.rt66.com/hrbmoore/HOMEPAGE/

The Lloyd Library and Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
· World class collection founded by John Uri Lloyd in 1864
· Largest library of medicinal plant books in the world
· Good meta-site, click on the Links button
http://www.libraries.uc.edu/lloyd/index.htm

A Modern Herbal
· Searchable hypertext version of a well known herb reference book first published in 1931
· organized by common name but you can word search the site under the botanical name.
· Covers medicinal, culinary, cosmetic properties, cultivation and folklore of herbs
· Indices of recipes and poisons
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/mgmh.html

A Mini-Course in Medical Botany
· maintained by Agriculture Research Unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
· contains modules such as  HDR (Herbalists’  Desk Reference)
· useful list of Chinese herbs most commonly used in the West
· WWW section with links to searchable phytochemical and ethnobotanical databases
http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/syllabus/

Herb Research Foundation
· this organization, together with American Botanical Council, puts out HerbalGram, respected herbal journal
· greenpapers on popular herbs containing grading of areas of knowledge for
· the herb, for eg. Echinacea gets a 2 out of 5 for clinical research
· extensive lists of articles on 15 different herbs
http://www.herbs.org/index.html