Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8341

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Blumenthal M.
Milestones in pharmaceutical botany since 1960.
Pharm Hist 1996; 38:(1):24-8

Abstract:

Some of the most successful prescription drugs derived from plants are listed, including vincristine, etoposide, vinblastine, and paclitaxel, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry in developing new drugs from exotic rain forest plants and by ethnobotanical prospecting is discussed; the development in the OTC market for herbal or alternative medicine and the proper use, growing consumer demand, and regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of herbal products are discussed.

Keywords:
History, 20th Century Pharmacy/history* Phytotherapy/history* United States

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909