Herb Research is of a Better Quality than Drug Research

Natural medicine’s critics used to say–and some who clearly don’t look at the literature still do–that there was no scientific research behind its claims. With the explosion of studies in the past several years, that criticism is no longer available. So the critics said that the research there was was of a lower quality than the research on drugs. So researchers put that criticism to the test . . .

and now it’s no longer available either. They matched herb studies with drug studies for the same conditions and found that 21% of the herb studies were of high quality methodology while only 5% of the drug studies were. They concluded that “ . . . the quality of trials of . . . herbal medicine is on average superior to trials of conventional medicine”

• Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2007;60:787-94