European law discriminates against herbal traditions - Health Supreme

June 18, 2010

European law discriminates against herbal traditions - Health Supreme NewsGrabs Friday, 18 June 2010




EU Herb Laws Discriminate Against Millennial Herbal Traditions



Ayurveda

The Chinese and Indian (Ayurvedic) medicinal traditions are amongst the oldest surviving health care traditions on the planet. Both have a documented history of more than 4,000 years, and both are truly holistic traditions in which consideration is given to the physical, mental and spiritual state. It is an irony that the failing western medicinal model, which is reliant heavily on new-to-nature molecules (pharmaceuticals), now provides the greatest threat to these age-old medical traditions.

My personal take on this is that the European law, called the Herbal Medicines Directive, discriminates against any herbal tradition that isn't the German one. The directive in fact was drawn up and lobbied into existence by German pharmaceutical interests to protect their herbal products from extinction. In the '90s the UK started complaining that Germany was not properly applying the European law on medicines, at the time called directive 65/65, and had to therefore take all those remedies registered under a simplified regime in Germany as "natural medicines", off the market.

So the European herbal medicines law was made expressly on the insistence of those pharma manufacturers to provide a place for THEIR herbal medicines under European law. There was no consideration of other herbal traditions. Who can blame them ... wouldn't want to invite any competition to mainstream medicine, would we?