Product Description

The Bestselling Guide to Herbal Remedies -- Completely Revised and Expanded

ince its original publication in 1992, Earl Mindell's Herb Bible has become the definitive guide to the world of herbal remedies. Recognized as today's leading trend in self-care, herbs can help you heal faster, live longer, and look better. In this completely updated edition, one of the world's foremost authorities on nutrition and natural remedies demystifies the language and lore of herbs and shows you how to choose and use herbs and herbal treatments -- from the traditional favorites to those on the cutting edge.

Here is new and valuable information on how herbs can treat depression and anxiety, boost energy, improve your sex life, combat aging, prevent illness, and speed healing. Highlights include:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172603 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Released on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743225489
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Earl Mindell, R.Ph., Ph.D., is the bestselling author of Earl Mindell's Vitamin Bible for the 21st Century, in addition to Earl Mindell's Peak Performance Bible, Earl Mindell's Supplement Bible, Earl Mindell's Secret Remedies, Earl Mindell's Anti-Aging Bible, Earl Mindell's Soy Miracle, and Earl Mindell's Food as Medicine. He is a registered pharmacist, a master herbalist, and a professor of nutrition at Pacific Western University in Los Angeles; he also conducts nutrition seminars around the world. He lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword: Before You Begin this Book

Ten years ago, when I first told a friend that I was writing a book on herbs, he looked startled and said, "Why, Earl, I had no idea that you could cook!"

Today, his comment seems laughable but, back then, most people still thought that herbs were only something you added to tomato sauce or sprinkled on a salad.

What a difference a decade makes!

According to a recent survey, one-third of all Americans today use herbal supplements and related products. Once relegated to a small shelf in the back of the store, herbs now account for about 25 percent of all sales in natural food stores. There are now row upon row of herbal supplements not just where you'd expect to find them -- in natural food stores -- but also in conventional pharmacies, discount stores, supermarkets, and even in doctors' offices. Aspirin and acetaminophen now stand side by side with herbs such as echinacea, goldenseal, kava, valerian, ginseng, and St. John's wort. If, as the saying goes, money talks, Americans are loudly voicing their support for herbal products. In 1994, Americans spent 1.6 billion dollars on herbal preparations; by 1998, that number had nearly tripled, to $4 billion in retail sales. I predict that the market will continue to grow exponentially.

Sales of herbal products have skyrocketed since Congress passed the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which radically changed the way supplements can be sold and marketed in the United States. The law lifted decades of regulatory barriers that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to bring new supplements to market. The law also made it easier for manufacturers to make health claims for their products as long as they had scientific backing. If an herb was a proven treatment for cold or headache, the manufacturer could say so on the label. This made it easier than ever for people to find and use the appropriate herbal products.

The herbal revolution has done nothing less than change the way medicine is being practiced. Once dismissed as quackery, traditional remedies are now getting a close look from mainstream scientists. The United States Congress has established the office of Alternative Medicine under the National Institutes of Health to study alternative medicine, including herbs. Recently, an entire issue of the conservative Journal of the American Medical Association was devoted to exploring various forms of alternative medicine. So much has happened since the Herb Bible was published in 1992, that it has become necessary to update this book. Not only do I introduce scores of new herbs in this new edition, but I also include the latest scientific findings on herbs that were listed in the old edition. Similar to the old Herb Bible, the new Herb Bible is designed so that it can be used by both the novice and the experienced herbal consumer.

In a sense, as we embark on a new millennium, we've come full circle. When I was growing up in Canada, my parents often relied on herbs and natural medicine to treat the common illnesses of childhood. However, by the time I started pharmacy school in 1958, the pill-popping era was just dawning. By the time I graduated and entered practice, there seemed to be a pill for whatever ailed us. Have a sore throat? Take an antibiotic. Think a headache is coming on? Reach for an aspirin. Need to drop some weight or pick up some energy? Try amphetamines. Want to calm down? A tranquilizer will help you. This was also the dawn of the space age. The United States was preparing to send a man to the moon in a space capsule. Therefore, it was only logical to believe that we would soon be able to cure the common cold, flu, acne, and various catastrophic illnesses with time-release capsules. The notion that lifestyle, diet, or exercise could possibly influence health was considered unscientific and profoundly silly. "Scientific" remedies were not hard to find, however. They were widely advertised and came packaged in attractive boxes, bottles, or blister packs. Natural remedies -- the kind our grandmothers and great-grandmothers relied on -- were dismissed as pure hokum. These were the days when there seemed to be nothing that nature could do that humans could not do better.

Against this backdrop, I reluctantly registered for the required course in pharmacognosy, the study of drugs derived from plants. My classmates and I disparagingly called the course "weeds and seeds," and thought that it was utterly weird. We went on field trips and foraged for plants known for their medicinal value. With my own hands, I picked them, dried them, and with an old-fashioned mortar and pestle, turned them into useful drugs. In the process, my skepticism about natural remedies began to fade and I started studying the literature some might call the lore of natural remedies. I was astonished to discover that people had been using natural remedies for thousands of years to successfully treat a wide variety of ills, ranging from heartburn to heart disease. In fact, prior to World War II, herbal medications were listed side-by-side with chemical drugs in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, the official listing of accepted medicines. Even today, nearly 50 percent of the thousands of drugs commonly used and prescribed are either derived from plant sources or contain chemical imitations of plant compounds. The list is impressive:

• Digitalis, a potent cardiotonic, is derived from the foxglove plant.

• Aspirin is a chemical imitation of salicin, found in the bark of the white willow tree.

• Reserpine, a blood pressure medicine, is actually an ancient remedy from India derived from an Asian shrub.

• Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, found in many over-the-counter cold remedies, are derived from the ephedra plant, used in China to treat colds and flu for more than five thousand years!

• Quinine, a famous malaria treatment, and quinidine, an antiarrhythmic medication, are made from the bark of the cinchona tree.

• Vincristine and vinblastine, two of our most successful cancer treatments, are derived from the rosy periwinkle tree, native to southern Madagascar. Medicine derived from this plant has saved the lives of thousands of victims of childhood leukemia.

• Taxol, derived from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree, has been used successfully to treat advanced ovarian cancer.

• Penicillin, the grandfather of antibiotics, is actually a mold, an organism produced by a fungus, a primitive plant.

Thus, I owe my lifelong interest in herbal medicine to the courses I took in pharmacognosy. After graduation, I began collecting antique herbal guides, often called herbals, some of which are more than two centuries old. But I never took my herbals to the pharmacy with me, because herbalism was considered obsolete. Indeed, not long after I graduated, pharmacognosy was dropped from the list of required courses by many pharmacy schools. Ironically, many schools have reintroduced the course and many others are considering it.

The major reason for the decline in herbalism was not the herbs' inefficacy but economics. Herbs are not as profitable as drugs. In the United States, most herbs are not recognized as drugs or as having any medicinal value. Rather, they are classified as food or food additives. Even if an herb is known to be beneficial as a medicine, it cannot be sold as a drug until it receives the official stamp of approval by the Food and Drug Administration, and approval does not come quickly, easily, or cheaply. Where the introduction of new drugs is concerned, the United States is one of the most restrictive countries in the world. The extensive testing required to achieve official drug status, that is, to prove a substance is safe and effective, can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years. This explains why the cost of the average prescription has risen tenfold since 1950!

Moreover, natural substances cannot be patented. When a pharmaceutical company creates a new drug, the company is given a twenty-year exclusive right to market that product, so that the company can recoup its research and development costs. Were a pharmaceutical company to simply package an herb, the company would receive no such market protection. Thus, there is little incentive to spend time and money investigating the potential benefits of an herb that people can grow themselves or that competitors are free to market. It's not surprising, therefore, that many pharmaceutical houses have lost interest in pursuing plant drugs altogether, and instead have focused their research and development efforts on new synthetic medications. An unfortunate consequence of this shift in emphasis to synthetic drugs was that many time-honored natural remedies were displaced and, at least for a while, forgotten.

Today, however, we are witnessing a renewed interest in herbal remedies, not only on the part of alternative physicians but from traditional medical practitioners as well. One reason is the recognition that, although synthetic drugs have certainly performed many miracles and saved countless lives, they have not turned out to be the "silver bullet" that pharmacologists hoped they would be. Virtually all of these drugs have well-known side effects, ranging from the unpleasant to the lethal. In many cases, they are not even effective. For example, antibiotics, for all their ability to defeat bacterial infections, are essentially useless against viruses, and many of the diseases that plague us today, from Shanghai flu to AIDS to chronic fatigue syndrome, are viral syndromes. What's even worse is that, due to the overuse of antibiotics, we are now threatened by new and deadlier strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria. One-third of all strains of streptococcus pneumonia are now resistant to one or more antibiotics. Once easily cured by penicillin, 90 percent of all staph infections are now resistant to this antibiotic, and some new strains are resistant to all d...

Customer Reviews

A good book but in no way a definite source

Earl Mindell's New Herb bible was one of the first books I bought on herbs. While this book is useful as a reference, it is in no way a definitive source that should be called a 'bible.' The writing is well done and simple, and the text and information aimed more toward a beginner in every sense of the word.

Mindell is more of a supplement expert, and it does show from time to time here. Some of his comments gave me pause though. For instance, he says "Homeopathic extracts used by homepathic practitioners are much stronger than conventional herbal tinctures and are strictly regulated by the FDA. They should only be used in conjunction with treatment by a homeopath practitioner." This threw me a bit, I'll admit it.

He goes on to say that herbal powders are common, yet does not mention that powdered herbs lose potency amazingly fast. When he said bitters can be nasty tasting and that some may prefer them in capsules, it's also left out that when you don't taste a bitter on the tongue, you don't get the effect, which is the point of taking a bitter. He also discusses Hippocrates as the father of modern medicine, a slight peeve of mine but no fault of the authors.

Chapter 2 is the point of the book - the 'hot hundred' Here Mindell discusses briefly 100 herbs. Some have one paragraph, others have six, with a listing of possible benefits, then how to use it, then cautions if applicable. As a quick reference for the beginner this is useful; however, it's also quite vague. Many can sit and say what an herb has been historically used for, what evidence may or may not show (using these words), but I never got the feel he put much faith into the herbs themselves.

Some of the cautions are a bit overdone as well, such as not to use blue cohosh because it could be toxic in high doses. Well....lots of things are toxic if overdosed on, does this mean we shouldn't use them in the right amount? On Cayenne pepper he states that people with gastrointestinal problems should not take cayenne and that you should be careful on the dose. Actually cayenne has shown much benefit in treating several gastrointestinal disorders and even if it feels hot going down, does not do damage or harm (or heat impact) internally. As to it causing kidney damage in high dosages? Never heard of this either.

However, this is not to say he is overly cautious about all, for he is not. He provides much of the information in a non-biased, fair way. He states the facts or studies on some herbs as they are, and then may put in his personal recommendation, such as on the comfrey controversy. His inclusion of "how to use it" for each herb came in handy as well.

From the hot hundred we go on to a listing of traditional favorites, broken down in the same way as above, then herbs from around the world (nice touch). Finally the herbal medicine cabinet has some basic and helpful remedies for a variety of complaints, from indigestion to colds and flu prevention. It ends with a chapter dedicated to women, then men, looking good, and aromatherapy.

In short it is a good book but because the scope was so large everything was kept short, basic, and simple...too much so. You learned a small bit about every herb, but not enough to really know the herb well enough. I would rather have a book that covered them in depth than barely brushing across them. All of it is generic, and cautious.

While good for a beginner, there are others out there that educate more and allow one to see the bigger picture of things. Sometimes people who are past the beginners stages take great joy and still learn from basic herbals, I know I do, but this isn't the case here. I'm afraid if you've passed Herbalism 101 you'll be bored soon with this. Stick to it if you only want to know the basics a small bit at a time.

An indispensable herb reference
With the increasing popularity of herbs, there come an increasing number of questions on what they are and how to use them. This book has most of the answers in an easy to use format. It gives you a description of the most commonly used herbs, their benefits, and guidelines on their use, including recommended dosages. It also gives warnings as to side effects and people who shouldn't take them.

Additionally, it is loaded with remedies for various maladies. I have been very pleased with this as a guide and the advice given here has been very helpful in soothing minor ailments.

The writing style is very straightforward, informative and easy to understand. This is a must-have book for anyone considering taking herbs as a supplement or remedy.

An easy to understand herbal reference
When the first Herb Bible came out, I found it incredibly informative. Eight years have passed and science knows more about herbal remedies (the big herbal boom was only a few years ago). For those who remember the original Herb Bible, the New Herb Bible is still in that same exact format, just with new herbs and new possible benefits of old herbs. Since the benefits of some herbs may be either fairy taled or over exaggerated by herbal vendors, not all of the remedies in the book worked on me, but the majority of them did. The most useful to me is the papain (a substance found in papaya) which I use as a natural antacid.