Lagundi, sambong, ampalaya wow UCLA doctors

An American suffering from asthma finds relief in lagundi tablets manufactured in the Philippines. A European athlete experiencing excruciating pains from kidney stones takes sambong tablets to flush them out. For now, these scenarios remain a dream but the idea of Philippine herbal medicines "healing the world" may not be so farfetched after all.

Medical practitioners at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) were sitting up and taking notice of sambong, lagundi, ampalaya and seven other Philippine medicinal plants when they were featured in a lecture by Dr. Francis Wade Gomez, medical director of Altermed Corp., early this year. It was the first time a Filipino doctor was invited by a reputable US medical institution to talk about Philippine herbs.

The lecture was arranged by Dr. Ka Kit Hui, director of the UCLA Center of East-West Medicine. Discussed was the use of herbal medicines in modern medical practice in the Philippines.

The 10 medicinal plants – sambong, lagundi, akapulko, ampalaya, garlic, yerba buena, pansit-pansitan, tsaang gubat, niyug-niyogan and guava – are being promoted by the Department of Health (DOH).

Today, only Altermed sells Ascof (lagundi), Re-Leaf (sambong) and Amargozin (ampalaya) in dosage forms. A subsidiary of Filipino-owned Pascual Laboratories, Altermed manufactures and distributes these traditional medicines. The company pays the government a royalty fee for as long as it is selling the herbal drugs.

Why is the world turning to lowly herbs at a time of great developments in pharmaceutics and genomics? Gomez explained: "With the advent of modern science, a big number of chemical and synthetic drugs are being developed which are very potent and very effective but also have high toxicity levels. Westerners are afraid of adverse side-effects, that’s why more and more consumers are opting for natural stuff."

He added: "Of course in the Philippines, the reasons are more economic. For instance, folks in the provinces who cannot afford to shell out P500 to P600 for a drug that will enhance one’s sexual performance will settle for the humble bataw and durian."

The National Integrated Research Program on Medicinal Plants (NIRPROMP), a consortium of top scientists and academic institutions in the Philippines, was organized 24 years ago by the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD).

The group listed down the common illnesses and surveyed 1,000 traditional healers around the country to determine which herbal medicines are used for which illnesses, what the side-effects are, and the comments of the herbolarios.

NIRPROMP was able to list down 1,500 plants, 480 of which have been folklorically validated. "The logic is if the plant is not effective and unsafe, the herbolarios will surely refrain from using it as they have a reputation to protect in their communities," Gomez said.

But the studies do not end there. Scientific validation – like the pre-clinical and clinical studies performed on synthetic drugs – are done to ascertain the positive and negative effects of the medicinal plants.

Taken in wrong doses, medicinal plants can pose complications in patients, which is why the Department of Health has been coming up with educational materials like pamphlets and leaflets on the proper preparation of dosage of the herbs. Fortunately, the herbolarios welcome the "intrusion" and actually follow the DOH guidelines, as they feel the government efforts are a validation of their plant-based medical practice handed down from generation to generation.

Of course, there will always be professional doctors and consumers who will remain unimpressed and say, "Good medicines don’t grow on trees." But Gomez begs to differ, saying, "Good medicines do grow on trees, but should be validated by science." He knows that the only way to convince doctors is to present them with enormous scientific data.