Sunday, August 9, 2009

St. John's wort: Used since ancient times

From http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalmedicine/StJohn27swort.html:

Many of SJW's therapeutic applications (except antiviral use), including its uses as a vulnerary, diuretic, and treatment for neuralgic conditions, stem from traditional Greek medicine, originally documented by ancient Greek medical herbalists Hippocrates (ca. 460–377 B.C.E.)Theophrastus (ca. 372–287 B.C.E.), Dioscorides (first century C.E.),and Galen (ca. 130–200 C.E.) (Bombardelli and Morazzoni, 1995; Hobbs, 1990; Leung and Foster, 1996; Upton, 1997).Since the time of Swiss physician Paracelsus (ca. 1493–1541 C.E.) it has been used to treat psychiatric disorders. At that time it was described as "arnica for the nerves" (Reuter, 1998). The aerial flowering parts of SJW have been used in traditional European medicine for centuries to treat neuralgia, anxiety, neurosis, and depression (Rasmussen, 1998). The traditional way to take SJW was as herbal tea, an aqueous extract whose single dose corresponded to 2–3 g of dried crude drug (Schulz et al., 1997). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American Eclectic physicians prescribed SJW to treat hysteria and nervous affections with depression. It was prescribed externally to treat wounds, bruises, sprains, and much more (Ellingwood, 1983; Felter and Lloyd, 1983; Felter, 1985; King, 1866; Snow, 1996; Upton, 1997). Today, St. John's wort is official in the national pharmacopeias ofCzechoslovakia, France, Poland, Romania, and Russia (Bruneton, 1995; Hobbs, 1989; Newall et al., 1996;Ph.Fr.X, 1990; Reynolds, 1993; Upton, 1997; USSR X, 1973).

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