Our main medical system is grounded in scientific medicine. Society has chosen this approach for a very important reason. It works...most of the time.

We hear, of course, about other kinds of medicine referred to as alternative medicine. They portray themselves as gentler, kinder, more ‘natural’ treatments. Many of them are herbal. They include doses of minerals. (Many of those minerals are the same as those we worry so much about in toxic dumps!) They include various kinds of massages and irrigation's of body parts and openings. Although they represent themselves as alternatives to current mainstream medicine, they are actually something very different. They are related to our too conventional medicine not as today's Chevrolet is to today's Ford, but as a 1910 Ford is to a 1999 Ford. Herbal remedies are based on 18th and 19th-century medical concepts. Those concepts were cutting edge for their time. They had some value. For the most part, when we don't use them now it's because we have better.

Today's medicines are those old medications, purified to their chemical elements, and standardized in dose, so that the effects are constant and predictable. Many of the popular herbal remedies interfere with regular medications for precisely this reason. A perfect example is digitalis. This medication used to treat heart failure has been in use since the 17th century. It was found in the leaves of the Foxglove plant. As recently as the 1960s there was available a digitalis pill which consisted of ground up whole leaf from the plant. The problem with using that whole leaf pill was no two batches of pills had the same strength or the same mixture of components. Now we use the individual components of the digitalis mix. It would be very dangerous to accidentally add an herbal preparation including foxglove to the medications a heart patient was already taking.