The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook_ A Home Manual - James Green [169]
NATIONAL FORMULARY (NF)
A formulary is a collection of working formulas for the preparation of medicinal compounds. A formulary may or may not give the therapeutic properties of such compounds.
The National Formulary is a semi-official work that includes standard formulas and directions for pharmacists to make the preparations used widely across the country, but which are no longer included in the United States Pharmacopoeia. The NF is basically a treatise of oldies but goodies, medicines that were at one time official, but no longer are, and are still in popular use by the medical profession. National Formulary preparations are designated by the abbreviation NF. When a preparation is prepared exactly as directed in the National Formulary VI (for example), it can be identified as such by noting it on the label using the symbol, NF VI.
Herbal medicine-makers are advised to seek out the National Formularies which were published around 1926 and earlier, when the healing professions employed mostly botanicals for their medicines.
PHARMACEUTICS (PHARMACY)
Pharmaceutics is the science and art of preparing, compounding, using, and dispensing herbal or chemical medicines.
PHARMACODYNAMICS
Pharmacodynamics is a study of the way in which an isolated plant or chemical constituent affects the body, or a study of the power of plant and chemical constituents upon normal living organisms (otherwise known as the physiological action of drugs).
PHARMACOGNOSY
Pharmacognosy is from the Greek word gnosis, a knowing or recognition. It is the science of dried plants which deals primarily with information on the sources and constituents of plants. It embraces the knowledge of the history, distribution, cultivation, collection, selection, preparation, commerce, identification, evaluation, preservation, and use of plant and chemical medicines. Modern pharmacognosy texts focus on the microscopic and chemical qualities of plants. Older books talk more about quality of the visible (macroscopic) nature of herbs. If you can find one, an old copy of Youngken’s A Textbook of Pharmacognosy is an invaluable aid for assessing herb quality.
PHARMACOKINETICS
Pharmacokinetics is the study of how the body affects an herb or drug (i.e., absorbs, distributes, metabolizes, and eliminates).
PHARMACOLOGY
Pharmacology is from the Greek words pharmakon, a medicine or drug, and logos, a study or science. It is the study of herbal or chemical drugs, their chemistry, their effects on the body, useful and dangerous actions, and dosage, and includes research into newly discovered plants and chemicals.
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION
Physiological action is the action of plant and chemical constituents upon what biomedical researchers call “healthy animals.” It has been studied to a lesser extent in humans. Drug action in one species may be widely divergent from that in non-human or other human mammals. The maximum value that “scientism’s” grim animal experimentation can have is to point out the direction and extent of activity a drug has upon certain types of tissue, and only in certain animals. This can be and frequently has been dangerously misleading. For example, thalidomide, a chemical tranquilizer drug once prescribed in Europe as a sedative to treat morning sickness, tested safe in the lab on mice, rats, dogs, cats, and monkeys. In humans, it rendered 10,000 children crippled and deformed at birth. Biomechanical differences between species are so great that it is impossible to study one species and expect to learn accurate and reliable information about another. This is amply illustrated by the fact that guinea pigs can eat strychnine alkaloid with no ill effects. Much of the information we have on the physiological action