Healing Weeds Are Close To Home

Over 40-percent of the medicines we take come from plants. Tea made from willow bark contains salicyclic acid-in other words, aspirin. The bark of Pacific yew contains taxol which reduces the production of cancerous tumors.

As luck would have it, one doesn't have to go much farther than right out your own door to find hundreds of medicinal plants. John Richard Stepp of the University of Florida's anthropology department did a study of which drugs on pharmacy shelves come from plants and which are synthesized in a laboratory. He found that although only about three percent of the world's quarter-million plants are weeds, weeds make up a third-36-of the 101 plant species used in pharmaceuticals. The best known of course is the poppy, from which morphine is derived. However scopolamine for motion sickness is weed based, as are the cancer medicines vinblastine, for Hodgkins, and vincristin, for childhood leukemia. These pharmaceutical are different from herbal medicines such as gingko biloba and garlic. Stepp got the idea when working in the Mexican highland state of Chiapas. The Mayan residents use weeds for all sorts of illnesses such as the common cold, upset stomachs, rashes and sprains. He also said he was, ?EUR??,,????'??struck by how the Mayans were ?EUR??,,????'??natural botanists?EUR??,,????'?? who made plants a central part of their lives. We worked with four and five-year-old kids who could name 100 plants.?EUR??,,????'?? American children would be hard pressed to name three. Stepp suggests that governments should promote tradition medicinal practices. ?EUR??,,????'??They are readily available, cost nothing to gather and are often more effective.