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Interviewer: Can you talk a little bit about - you said you were
formed about 20 years ago - how important it is to
continually educate people on herbal and botanical medicines?
Dr. Upton: It's constant. For example, yesterday we had a meeting here
that was organized by the tradeshow coordinators all on botanical
identification and recognizing how bad of a job much of the industry is
doing on actually even knowing what's going into the products. I take that
back. In some cases it's because some people don't care.
In every industry you have a segment that they're just there for the
business model. As long as they can sell a product profitably, they're not
really concerned about quality and sometimes even purity or identity.
They're just selling a commodity. Sometimes they never even do a single
test to determine what's in their product.
On the other hand, there are a lot of companies that have been in the
industry for a long time because of philosophical belief in natural
medicine, in natural healthcare, specifically herbal medicine. They care
very much, but still many of the tools that, again, much of the knowledge
that we had in how to assess quality control when herbal medicine was in
its heyday was gone.
So people are relearning what tests they have to perform, how they have to
perform them. Again, there's no single place in the United States that
trains people on how to do quality control assessment of herbal medicine.
You can go to a food tech university, you can go to electronics, computer,
whatever, mechanics, painting for crying out loud, you can go to any
vocation but you don't have an avenue to really learn about the quality
assessment of herbal medicine.
It's starting in a few universities, (inaudible 00:01:54) in Maryland and
Bastyr up in Washington. So there are a few programs that are teaching it,
but far and wide that knowledge base was lost and we're continually
developing new analytical methods for different plants and then also new
plants that are coming into the market.
A hundred years ago, there wasn't any acai and (inaudible 00:02:17) and now
they are huge commodities. There was no resveratrol. There was no
(inaudible 00:02:21) that anybody knew about as far as raw materials. So
it's a constant updating of what we know about our plants.
Information
http://www.ihealthtube.com
Roy Upton is the Executive Director of the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia. He discusses the continuing efforts to educate people about botanical and herbal medicine. He also discusses the changing trends in the practices as well.
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