Urban Fringe Pharmacy

I see the BBC are trailing a new series called ‘grow your own drugs’. This has been made by Silver River Productions, and is presented by a hot new TV ethnobotanist, James Wong – no doubt this year’s answer to Professor Gorgeous (a.k.a. Kathy Sykes), who presented the high gosh-factor mini series about complementary medicine last year, or whenever it was.

The series will also feature Professor Elizabeth Williamson, a pharmacist with a special interest in medicinal plants. I saw her give a really interesting lecture a few years ago at Kings College, London on synergy between different compounds in liquorice. She seemed to be attempting a rational explanation that would be acceptable to pharmacologists for a phenomenon that herbalists have always known and worked with, namely that plants produce compounds that work synergistically with each other when acting on the human organism. In other words the effects they produce as part of a whole plant are greater than would be expected if they were administered separately. This is a fairly straightforward idea, but one that medical scientists have a lot of difficulty with. The main reason being that you can’t design a quantitative study that will measure the effects of more than one compound working in synergy with another, you can only measure one uniquely definable intervention at a time – any more than that, and how would you know which intervention was causing which effect? And fair enough. But Liz Williamson had a fairly good stab at trying to explain the theory of how synergy might be measured through some other mathematical sophistry, which I didn’t understand at all, but which clearly demonstrated her heart and intentions were in the right place. You can see ther paper on synergy here. Her involvement in the programme does give me some hope that it will have some substance behind it.

The most noticeable thing about the blurb that has been sent out, and the trails that are being shown, is that there’s no reference to medical herbalists or the practice of herbal medicine, and I’m not aware of any herbalists who have been consulted in the making of the programme. I wonder why? Perhaps the series title is a clue – maybe like most TV these days, it’s designed to attract 15 year olds, and is made and presented by 15 year olds too. I wonder too how old James Wong really is, and if he actually knows anything about the practice of herbal medicine? Lets hope he does.

I think the absence of herbalists in the making of this programme points to a fairly predictable outcome. Plants will be discussed as though they are merely weaker substitutes for drugs, and are to be used in exactly the same way – a specific plant to treat a specific symptom. There will be lots of goshing and gollying about clinical trials involving St Johns Wort and what someone’s grandma used to do with comfrey. And there will be lots of warning about being careful, and talking to your pharmacist first if you want to attempt anything bolder than making a nice face cream. I would love to be proved wrong.

Meanwhile, of course, if you really want to know about growing your own drugs, or how to find them growing all by themselves, then why not come on one of my grown up walks or workshops?