References on the efficacy of herbal medicine in animals

[Guest guest]

Hi Liza, and Colleagues,

 

Colleagues, if you can help this student to find good references on

applications of herbal medicine in animals, please contact her off-

list, with a copy of your reply to the List.

 

Please see my response to her query, below - I have little to offer

because I can find so little on the topic in the professional

databases [CAB & Medline].

 

" liza muriel russo " <clorofil2 wrote:

> My name is Liseth. I´m a student of biology and I'm doing a

> project for my license degree. My research is on the usage of

> medical plants for similar conditions in animal and human patients.

> I have great difficulty to locate articles or references on this

> topic. Here we have no useful data on the issue and we have no

> ethnoveterinary studies in Bolivia. I need good references as an

> important part of my study. I tried searching the internet, but

> found no useful information there. For that reason I want to ask

> if you can help me about it for researching because it is

> applicable for the future. Hoping for your answer and waiting for your

> help, Respectfully, Liseth Muriel Russo

 

Liseth, I have little to offer as regards good references to herbal

usage in animals. I have passed your request to VBMA [Vet

Botanical Med Assoc], PVA-L [Professional Vet Acupuncture List],

and CHA [Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine], requesting members that may

have material to contact you.

 

1. You should consider joining EthnoVeterinary Mailing list (EVM).

To join, send a blank email to: <Join-EVM.

 

EVM has researchers, academics and clinicians in many

countries, including developing nations. Also, for Information on

Indigenous Knowledge see: http://www.nuffic.nl/ik-pages

 

2. Liza, in a separate mail, I will attach a digital copy of the paper

" Sustainable veterinary medicine for the new era " by Lin et al

[submitted recently to the OIE, Paris]. That paper has a few

references to the results of experiments by Dr. Lin and others with

herbal treatment of some animal diseases.

 

Also, please email Krishna Kaphle <krishnakaphle.

He is a coworker in the Lab of Prof Jen-hsou Lin (Taipei). Ask him

for a photocopy of the summaries of any papers that he has on

herbal medicine for animals.

 

Unfortunately, that is all that I can offer. Though the databases

[Medline and CAB] have thousanda of abstracts on human herbal

medicine, and on experimental studies in lab animals, they have

very, very few papers on controlled trials of herbal medicine in farm-

animals or domestic pets.

 

Yesterday, in an attempt to locate the names addresses of authors

who have published clinical trials on herbal medicine in animals I

searched CAB [the database of the Commonwealth Bureau of

Agriculture]. The search profile was: ((herbal medicine? or

phytotherapy or herbal extract? or kampo or ethnoveterinary or

ethno-veterinary) and (dog? or canine or bitch?? or pup or pups or

cat? or feline or kitten? or cattle or cow? or heifer? or steer? or

bull? or calf or calves or horse? or mare? or filly or fillies or equine

or foal or foals or yearling? or animal?) and (clinical trial? or

controlled-trial?)) not (man in OD)

 

That search was disheartening. It produced only 10 hits from

international literature over the past 10 years and most of those

hits were irrelevant!!

 

If one searched Medline and CAB with no date limits, and added

extra terms (such as herbal formula? or phyto-therap*) and

expanded the search to include pigs and sheep, one might come

up with a few more hits but their number would be paltry.

 

We have a long way to go to bring herbal medicine into mainstream

vet med! This is because there is pitifully little real science (if that

is defined as published clinical trials or controlled trials) to support

the clinical use of herbal medicine in animals listed in the search

profile above. The main reason is probably that good independent

research (as distinct from commercial in-house promotional

bunkum) has not been done. This is mainly because of lack of

interest by professional researchers/clinicians, AND lack of

adequate resources, especially funding.

 

 

Best regards,

 

 

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