[jlg23]

This is being done:

India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_....

China: research into TCM happens a lot, even in Western laboratories

Amazonian and African plants are cataloged and analyzed for the pharmacological properties. I cannot name specific research projects, but plenty of books from respectable sources can be found. When traveling the Amazon I even met some pharmacologists who scout for plants (all but one working for pharmaceutical companies).

Unfortunately the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start and thus the hardest part for the interested amateur pharmacologist is filtering out all the pseudo-scientific publications in that field. It's not all bad, a lot is even useful as a starting point for serious research, but hard facts are hard to come by.

[dalke]

> the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start

I don't think it's really meaningful to say that. To start with, what do you mean by "alternative healing movement"? The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s. But many of the practice and of course many of the inspirations are a lot older.

On the other hand, ethnobotanists have been cataloging pharmacological properties for over a century. Indeed, this Nobel Prize is for similar research done in the 1960s, so to say 'a 20 or 30 year head-start' would be to say the alternative healing movement started doing this no later than the 1940s.

The confounding problem is that herbalism is a much older practice, with a recorded history stretching back 1000s of years. When did the alternative healing movement not use herbalism?

I don't know enough about the history to really clear things up, but I can point to the 1987 essay on various aspects of the traditional medicinal aspects of celery - http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf - to show that it's hard to say that the modern alternative healing movement added anything new to the long and world-wide herbalist tradition.

[jlg23]

> The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s

Yes, I am referring to the group(s) that applied that label to themselves, not to herbalists as a whole, but to groups that elevated wishful thinking and superstition to "facts". They always had cures for aids, cancer or you-name-it, based on "nobody of the natives who used the plant ever had it" (reality: were never diagnosed because they never saw a doctor).

I am talking about the groups that give every scientific mind the creeps and that harmed traditional medicine by putting it into the esoteric corner. But as I said, even these groups added some value - if only by collecting hints at useful plants and their applications that can serve as a starting point for further (actual) research.

My personal low was a Swiss "healer" who attributed the pain-killing effect of cloves to their shape - the discussion turned really nasty when I pointed her at Eugenol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol).

The personal highlight was the Moroccan herbalist in Fez, who knew the limits of what he can do, knew the pharmacology (to some degree) behind his plants and always could explain why they did things the way they did (and it's not "because tradition"...)

[dalke]

Then I am certain that the scientific cataloging and analysis of the the pharmacological properties of traditional medicines started before the alternative medicine movement.

For example, "Ethobotany of the Tewa Indians" (1916) at http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-1.pdf starts:

> ETHNOBOTANY is virtually a new field of research, a field which, if investigated thoroughly and systematically, will yield results of great value to the ethnologist and incidentally also to the botanist. Ethnobotany is a science, consequently scientific methods of study and investigation must be adopted and adhered to as strictly as in any of the older divisions of scientific work. It is a comparatively easy matter for one to collect plants, to procure their names from the Indians, then to send the plants to a botanist for determination, and ultimately to formulate a list of plants and their accompanying Indian names, with some notes regarding their medicinal and other uses. ...

> Ethnobotanical research is concerned with several important questions: (a) What are primitive ideas and conceptions of plant life? (b) What are the effects of a given plant environment on the lives, customs, religion, thoughts, and everyday practical affairs of the people studied ? (c) What use do they make of the plants about them for food, for medicine, for material culture, for ceremonial purposes? ....

http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-2.pdf has more details about specific applications.

So you can see already by this time scientists were collecting this sort of information.