If you’ve been wondering why Nigerian doctors warn people sternly against taking herbal concoctions, you’d learn some of the reasons on this page.
And no, it’s not because they’re afraid that herb sellers would send them out of business by luring patients away from them as some conspiracy theorists claim (isn’t that just ridiculous?)
So, read on to enlighten yourself.
Imagine this…
You saw a big, black scorpion crawling on your ceiling.
Terrified, you quickly looked around to find something you could use to kill it.
Then you pulled out a sledgehammer from your drawer and threw it straight at the scorpion.
You hit the target.
The hammer crushed the scorpion. And both dropped down to the floor — but along with broken pieces of your ceiling.
You looked up and saw the new ugly hole in your ceiling. The hammer punched it.
Yes, your sledgehammer killed the scorpion. But it also left you with huge damage that would cost good money to fix!
At last, it ended in sadness and regret.
— END OF SCENARIO —
No doubt, many herbs have medicinal benefits.
They contain active natural ingredients that can help cure certain diseases.
And that’s why they’re used in the production of many drugs used today.
But taking herbal concoctions can be like killing a scorpion on your ceiling using a sledgehammer.
By “herbal concoctions”, I mean herbal formulations that haven’t been rendered into standardized drug forms.
You see, downing a cup of your favorite anti-malarial herbal concoction might have been treating your malaria in the past.
But how sure are you that it’s not causing a covert “sledgehammer effect” on the ceiling — your body organs in this case?
Now, before you dismiss this as just another anti-nature rant, get this clearly:
In medicine, there’s more to using a drug than merely figuring that it can treat a certain disease.
More importantly, research is carried out to answer certain questions.
Does it really treat all or the majority of cases of the target condition?
Does it express adverse effects on body organs while treating the target condition? If yes, at what dose levels?
How damaging are these adverse effects in the short and long term?
Are there safer dose levels that wouldn’t cause adverse effects, and yet treat the target condition satisfactorily?
Are there alternatives that wouldn’t express the same adverse effects?
Or is there a way to specially formulate this drug to stamp out the adverse effects, while still achieving the intended treatment benefits?
These and more are questions no ‘agbo’ seller can give you proven answers to.
And your agbo seller has never entered a laboratory to conduct research on these herbs.
Interestingly, in the medical world, many drugs have been banned from further production just because they were later found out to have some dangerous effects — such as containing cancer-triggering agents, etc.
This drives home the point that even after a drug has been certified safe for use, research on it never stops.
Not the case with your herbal concoctions!
This is just one angle to the potentially dangerous aspects of herbal concoctions. For the sake of brevity, others have been reserved for later.
So, before you start touting your trusted herbal “formula” as the next best thing after cheese balls, think about your liver, kidneys, your lungs, your heart, your liver, your brain, and your other organs.
You sure don’t want to have the sledgehammer effect on these organs.
Not even in these days when, ironically, some herbs are preserved using harmful chemicals or unhygienic methods.
Long story short: Use medically proven and standardized medications only — as prescribed by your doctor!