• Question: Is natural medicine better than chemical?

    Asked by kamilo12 to David, Jonathan, Ou, Pete, Sam on 10 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Pete Etchells

      Pete Etchells answered on 10 Jun 2012:

      It depends what you mean by chemical. Most manufactured drugs are actually derived from natural substances! The trouble with many ‘natural’ medicines is that there is very little scientific evidence that they work. When a new drug is developed, it must go through a lot of serious testing before it is allowed to be given to patients – it’s extremely important that we know if there are any side effects from using it, and whether or not it actually does what we’re expecting it to. With a lot of natural medicines however, there have been fewer studies looking at how effective they are. They might work for some people, but they might make others actually worse. Some types of medicine haven’t been proven to work at all – things like homeopathic medicines are very dubious.

Comments

  • Photo: Austin

    Austin commented on :

    With a lot of the (supposedly) natural therapies it’s worse than that they haven’t been proven to work. Some have been fairly clearly proven NOT to work, or to be absolutely clearly no more than a placebo.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo
    Homeopathy, which Pete mentioned, is the most famous example. On the whole, I think that once it’s clear that something doesn’t work then it shouldn’t be used, at least on the NHS.

    With some medicines, kind of the ‘reverse’ experiment (herbal vs pharmaceutical) was already done many years ago, since, as Pete says, a lot of pharmaceuticals are plant-derived. There is a plant called Rauwolfia which was traditionally used in India as an anti-high-blood-pressure drug, and about 60 years ago it started to became popular in Western medicine too. Then someone isolated from it the chemical, reserpine, that was responsible for most of the blood pressure lowering effect.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserpine

    One big problem with herbal medicines is actually knowing HOW MUCH of the active stuff in it you are giving, because how a plant is grown obviously makes a lot of difference to the chemicals the plant makes. So when doctors could use Rauwolfia (the plant) OR reserpine (the chemical from the plant), it turned out to be far easier to give purified reserpine. The point was they knew how much medicine they were giving, so could adjust the patient’s dose reliably. If the doctors gave the plant then they could never really know how much of the drug the patient was going to get. So within a few years reserpine completely took over from Rauwolfia, because it worked better. Then later we got drugs which worked better than reserpine, and had less side effects than reserpine (and the plant). So those drugs, or even better ones again, became the ones we use now.

    It’s also worth saying that your body doesn’t really ‘distinguish’ between chemicals made in a lab, and chemicals made by a plant! They both get treated the same way by your body, as ‘unusual chemicals’. Plenty of very poisonous stuff in plants, as Pete already said. Remember that plants have evolved to make a lot of chemicals specifically to make the plant nasty-tasting or dangerous for animals to eat..!

  • Photo: billclinton

    billclinton commented on :

    you dont need medicine, natural causes will take place

  • Photo: John

    John commented on :

    Comedian Tim Minchin summed this up quite well I thought:

    “By definition, alternate medicine has either not been proven to work or has been proven not to work.

    We have a name for alternative medicine that has been proven to work… medicine”

    I would echo this point. As Pete correctly points out, in his excellent answer, most drugs are derived from natural substabces, such as aspirin.