Plant Medicine: Herbal Extraction Methods
Varied methods for producing herbal salves and herbal tinctures
N/A
September/October 1998
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Kristen Myers, lab manager for Turtle Island Herbs in Boulder, Colorado, pours an oil solvent, called a menstruum, onto fresh arnica. The oil and herb will be mixed, then left to soak.
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In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, three
herbal product manufacturers are hard at work drawing medicinal
compounds from plants. Two of these companies are less than a mile
apart in Boulder, Colorado, and a third is in nearby Louisville.
But the roots of their methods and philosophies are very
different.
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Each manufacturer has its own method of extracting plant
medicine, which is then used to make salves and tinctures that are
sold nationwide. While the method may not make a difference to
consumers, it should, each manufacturer says—with all due respect
for the others.
Different extraction methods illustrate the contrasting
philosophies pulling at the ends of contemporary herbal medicine.
One supports the highly scientific method of standardization, which
involves measuring and extracting specific compounds believed to be
responsible for the herbs’ medicinal effects. The other is the
traditional “whole herb” school of thought, which asserts that all
of a plant’s compounds contribute to its ability to heal and
protect health, and plucking out one or a few compounds means
losing that synergy.
“Just because something is standardized or has scientific
testing behind it does not mean that it is high standard—scientific
validation is no guarantee of quality,” says Feather Jones, founder
of Turtle Island Herbs in Boulder and director of the Rocky
Mountain Center for Botanical Studies. “Plants are like people. You
can’t standardize them.”
Rod Lenoble, scientific affairs manager at Hauser, Inc., has
another view. “We’re generally conservative,” Lenoble says. “But
we’re looking at the totality of scientific data and preparing
extracts using ratios that were proven to be effective in the
studies.”
Hauser supplies companies such as Rexall with herbal extracts.
Hauser’s extraction process is a trade secret, but Lenoble says it
“emulates a tea cup”—plant material is put into a big vat with a
solvent of ethanol and water, known as a menstruum, to draw out the
plant’s constituents; Lenoble says their low-heat process combined
with the watered-down ethanol makes for a gentler solvent. The
process also entails computers, analytical chemistry, and
pharmaceutical testing, all required to ensure that the final
extract contains specific compounds in set ratios.
Down the road from Hauser at Turtle Island, which sells its
brand directly to retailers, the process is more traditional and
less scientific, in the mainstream sense of the word. Under Jones’s
direction, employees extract to “maximum potency” standards laid
out in The United States Pharmacopeia (USP). The USP contains
official herbal monographs first written in the 1800s and updated
through the 1920s, when the U.S. medical community turned away from
herbal remedies to focus on synthetic pharmaceuticals.
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