The healing power of medicinal plants

• April 18, 2024

Faith in the healing power of traditional medicine is very important in Mexico. You only have to visit a market to notice the number of stalls where medicinal plants are offered and to find healers who widely recommend their use.

To show the Sonora market in Mexico City, where on average about 10 tons of healing plants are sold on average.

Faith moves mountains, but each patient is a particular case and the use of certain herbs without knowing the state of health of each person should not be advised in a generalized way.

Do not eat before an operation

A recent study of the Pharmacy and Anesthesiology services of the Germans Trias and Pujol Hospital in Badalona (Barcelona) indicates that the consumption of medicinal plants can be "dangerous" before undergoing surgery. This is because some substances can interfere with the process of anesthesia or healing.

Science has identified nine substances that can interfere with some drugs or cause adverse reactions in patients, namely: kava, ginkgo, serenoa repens, St. John's wort, ephedra, echinacea, valerian and garlic.

In the opinion of Maite Bosch, one of the researchers of the study, the effects of these medicinal plants are multiple, "from delaying the recovery of the anesthesia, altering the effect of other drugs or promoting a hemorrhage".

Many medicinal plants can be toxic and harmful if their management is not known. The argument that because they are natural are not dangerous, it is false.

A problem of popular phytotherapy is the difficulty of keeping a check on the dose and quality of the product, which can lead to risks and damage to health, according to the specialists of the Herbarium of the Mexican Institute of Social Security.

Video Medicine: 6 Plants Native Americans Use To Cure Everything (April 2024).