Herbal medicine is the use of naturally-occurring substances for healing. In traditional Chinese medicine, one of the oldest and most-developed systems of herbal medicine in the world, the word herb is defined by any substance found in nature used as a medicine. Examples are minerals, sea shells, seaweeds, green plants, mushrooms, and even animal parts. Although this is the traditional definition, many modern herbalists do not use animal parts in their practice today because some animals such as the sea horse are now considered rare and endangered, and international laws prohibit their harvest or sale.

Herbal medicine practitioners today usually focus on dried plants and plant extracts, and recommend a wide variety as single herbs or in prescriptions sometimes containing ten or twenty herbs. A well-trained herbalist might be familiar with the traditional uses and safety profiles of one hundred, and in some cases as many as 300 different herbs. Increasingly, many herbalists are also versed in the published scientific literature detailing the efficacy and safety of dozens of popular herbal remedies.

All parts of plants are used for medicine, including fruits, leaves, bark, and roots. The knowledge of exactly what part of a plant to harvest and what time of year is best is considered one key to successful practice, and this knowledge has been passed down in written form, or by word of mouth, from generation to generation. Dried or fresh plants are harvested from the wild or on farms, then dried, and processed into many different types of herbal medicines, including teas, alcoholic extracts called tinctures, creams and salves to be applied externally, and a large array of tablets and capsules. Today herbal medicines can be found in convenience stores, supermarkets, health food stores, and most pharmacies.

Some of the capsules and tablets contain herbs in their simple dried and powdered state. Other products in capsule in tablet form contain extracts where the active ingredients of the herbs have been removed by a solvent like ethyl alcohol, and then concentrated in a vacuum dryer or other dryer to produce a concentrated powder. This powder is then pressed into tablets and packed in the capsules. The left-over fiber is then composted, as it contains very little of the plant’s active compounds.

Herbal products can be used regularly for prevention of symptoms and disease, such as the frequent use of Hawthorne as a heart tonic, or in higher amounts for short periods of time to help relieve acute symptoms like a sore throat, cough, or runny nose associated with a respiratory tract infection.