Herbal medicine attempts to find the underlying cause of an illness rather than focusing on treating individual symptoms. Herbalists believe that herbs can help the body to heal itself by restoring harmony and balance and activating the body's natural healing abilities. By stimulating the immune system, a cascading healing effect occurs in the body, positively affecting mental health.

The act of prescribing and creating herbal medicine is an art. By combining things like leaves, flowers, stems, berries, and roots of plants, herbalists are able to prevent, relieve, and treat illness. From a scientific perspective, many herbal treatments are considered experimental. In reality, herbal medicine is ancient history. Many common medications were developed from old healing traditions that treated health problems with specific plants. Drug companies routinely isolate the medicinal properties of botanicals, synthesizing plant components in large laboratories for use in pharmaceutical preparations.

Much of the development of pharmacopoeia was derived from the herbal knowledge of native people. In fact, about 25% of drugs come from plants. For example, aspirin is a derivative of salicylic acid, which originally comes from white willow bark (Salix alba) and meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria).6 Digitalis (the heart regulator) and ephedrine (the bronchodilator used to decrease respiratory congestion) were both originally discovered while researching the medicinal property of plants. A few other well-known examples are as follows:

• The blood pressure medication reserpine came from rauwolfia (Rauwolfia serpentina), an Asian shrub.
• The antimalarial quinine was developed from Cinchona bark (Cinchona succirubra).
• The antispasmodic atropine came from belladonna (Atropa belladonna) leaves.
• The heart drug gigotoxin was synthesized from purple foxglove (Scrophulariaceae) leaves.
• Emetine, used to treat infections and parasites, came from ipecac root (Cephaelis ipecacuanha).
• Morphine was derived from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum).

Using herbal medicine can be as simple as taking a single herb, such as St. John's wort, or it can be a more complex process. Herbalists believe in herbal synergy, which is the synergistic power of a number of botanicals working together as one powerful healing agent. After an herbalist diagnoses a problem, a remedy is created using a combination of herbal ingredients and other compounds. While a conventional pharmaceutical drug will usually contain a single active ingredient, an herbalist will often use multiple constituents together to treat an illness.

References
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