mormonsandscience

Do you believe that natural remedies have the potential to heal wounds and cure diseases?  I do because in Alma 46:40 it says that the Lord provided humanity with “many plants and roots [of excellent quality]...to remove the cause of diseases.”  Yet if you are like me, you rarely turn to natural remedies.  Like so many of you, I have taken a few herbs (the legal kind) and tried a couple of holistic remedies, but never knowing if they really worked, I quit.  

What is wrong with this picture?  Everything.  The Book of Mormon tells us that there are plenty of high-potency natural remedies out there, but we have insufficient knowledge about what they are, where to find them, and how they work.  Granted, there is literature on the efficacy and uses of herbs, but it is limited, especially in comparison to the literature on pharmaceutical drugs.

Drug development is a multi-billion dollar per year industry.  Drug companies pour millions of dollars into testing drugs to uncover their potential benefits and drawbacks.  The FDA drug testing process is standardized to optimize benefits and minimize harm to humans and animals.  Before releasing a drug to the public we want to know everything there is to know about it.  We want to know where it works, why it works, who benefits, and who does not benefit.  

Why hasn’t our pharmaceutical industry given equal attention to natural remedies?  If plants and herbs can heal and cure disease, then why are we not investigating natural resources with equal rigor?  By expending all of our resources on synthetic drugs we are ignoring half of the possibilities.  We’ve put all our eggs into one basket (the drug basket), and left the natural remedies basket largely empty.  I hope that I am not the only person who has a problem with this.  I believe that many people have died and countless others are leading less than healthy lives because we have largely ignored natural remedies.

We have not pursued natural remedies with the same rigor because natural remedies cannot be patented.  You see, when a drug company develops a new drug, the company is allowed to put a patent on it so that no one else can develop and sell the same drug.  Pharmaceutical patents are generally a good thing because they enable companies to recover and the millions they spent on testing and development, and make a profit. Without this protection there would be no incentive to develop drugs.  After a company has recouped its costs and made some money, a patent usually expires and other companies are allowed to make generic versions of the drug and sell it at a lower price. 

If a pharmaceutical company is unable to patent a natural remedy, then there is no financial incentive to develop and test herbs, plants, and roots – so they don’t.

This situation needs to change.  We could start by allowing drug companies to patent natural remedies.  By allowing patents, we will facilitate the rigorous testing of herbs, plants, and roots.  Until then, we will largely be in the dark about the best plants, doses, and combinations of natural remedies to use to treat injuries and cure diseases. (Mormons and Science 09.08)

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