Threat to traditional herbalists.

Endangered:
Your Access, Your Choices,
Your Traditional Herbal Medicine Traditions, Your Environment

Current proposals and recent UK laws following from a EU Directive (THMPD) are posed to greatly reduce your choice to use herbal medicine and your access to practitioners prescribing herbal medicines. Why? The official reason given is safety, fair competition and absence of a legally enshrined definition of 'herbalist'.

Save Our Herbs; the Campaign for the Protection of Herbal Medicine. Strongly objects to these actions and the official reasoning to these changes. Contrary to popular myth, both herbal medicine and herbalists are regulated by various laws ensuring their honesty and safety.

Please download and read another file on this subject from here.

The vast majority of herbal medicines are extremely safe, even in the hands of charlatans, as history and our experiences testify.

Common Law set down by Henry VIII defines a herbalist '…henceforth it shall be lawful to every Person being the King's subject. having Knowledge and Experience of the Nature of Herbs, Roots, and Waters, or of the Operation of the same, by Speculation or Practice, within any part of the Realm of England, or within any other the King's Dominions, to practice, use, and minister in…'

Fair competition has been obliterated by new UK laws from an EU Directive. All herbal products now require a very expensive license, approval by the MHRA and to adhere to pharmaceutical manufacturing processes.

Herbal Medicine is and always has been, the 'People's Medicine', and there is no evidence that either herbal medicine or herbalists present significant risk to warrant these measures. However, these changes will;

Strip our shops of thousands of Traditional Herbal Medicine products

Destroy small retail businesses and cottage industries

Greatly reduce your access and choice to Traditional Herbal Medicines and Herbalists

Allow large companies, often pharmaceutical companies to take over the herbal medicine market

Encourage profit driven growth of genetically engineered herbs and non-traditional herbal products, having a devastating effect on our environment.

The MHRA (UK) have the authority to decide what is and what isn't a herbal medicine, their ambiguous guidelines can only cause further concern. The vast amount of our herbs are used both as foods and medicines, when does a herb become medicine, a food or a poison? In the UK, Codex cannot affect our herbal medicines but will impact detrimentally on those used as food, supplements and vitamins. Some Traditional Herbal Medicines have already been banned on very dubious evidence. Where are we heading?

Is this history repeating itself? The reason for Henry VIII's, 'Herbalists Charter', '…….the Company and Fellowship of Surgeons of London, minding only their own Lucres, and nothing the Profit or ease of the Diseased or Patient, have sued, troubled, and vexed divers honest Persons, as well Men as Women,…..'

Save Our Herbs needs your support to help stop this nonsense, please visit our website for further information www.saveourherbs.org.uk

You can support us by signing our petition at: www.gopetition.com/petitions/support-herbal-medicine.html

and by writing to your MP for their support, responding to the current DH Consultation Document by 2/11/09 www.dh.gov.uk/en/Consultations/Liveconsultations/DH_103567 (a sample response can be found on our website), spreading the word, participating in our forum and offering suggestions, skills and opinions.

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