Dear Friends,

We wanted to make you aware of a wonderfully written article that appeared in HerbalGram Issue 145-Winter 2026 (current issue) Western Herbal Medicine Evidence: A Pragmatic Framework for Traditional Plant Medicines. The primary author of the article is Dr. Sandra Clair from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, along with colleagues from the Rand Center (Santa Monica, CA), University of Southern California-Los Angeles, and University of Zurich.

The article focuses on the manner in which evidence assessment is applied to traditional medicine knowledge, the limitations of the Western pharmaceutical-biomedical paradigm that is research driven, and how applying this limited expression of evidence is not in the best interest of public health. Most importantly, it offers a paradigm for documenting traditional herbal knowledge based on hundreds of years of accumulated human experience that, if critically assessed, can better inform herbal medicine use and policies.

The acceptance of herbal medicine use is most often hindered by the belief that there is not enough evidence, or there is a lack of confidence and clarity in the recording of human herbal use experience over the past several hundred to thousands of years. This uncertainty limits the potential for public health benefits. The fact that use of herbal medicine is growing exponentially globally necessitates that a different paradigm for assessing evidence be explored and Dr. Clair and colleagues have done an exemplary job in stating this case.

If you are not already a HerbalGram subscriber or member of the American Botanical Council (ABC, Austin, TX), we encourage you to begin with this issue.

Sincere regards,

Roy Upton RH, DipAyu

American Herbal Pharmacopoeia ®