Herbal medicines 'need recognition'

JAKARTA (JP): Although they have been proven efficacious in curing illnesses for many years, traditional herbal medicines remain in a class below modern drugs, due to mandatory clinical testing that costs a lot, a businessman says.

General manager of traditional herbal medicine producer PT Sido Muncul Irawan Hidayat, told a seminar here on Saturday that many of its peer companies could not afford to pay the testing charges, which reached Rp 400 million on average.

"Clinical testing has been serving as a 'hurdle' for traditional herbal medicines to clear before they can complement modern drugs," Irawan complained.

He was commenting on the statement of another speaker, Mawarwati Jamaluddin of the Food and Drug Control Agency (BPOM), who said that despite the popularity of herbal medicines, only a few producers had conducted modern clinical tests to ensure their safety.

"They even fail to carry out pre-clinical testing, which is compulsory if certain herbal plants are to be used as medicines," she said.

Irawan asserted that as part of the traditional heritage, herbal medicines had been proven for years to heal sicknesses, even without clinical testing, but this fact had been ignored by medical circles in the country.

"We have apparently separated ourselves from our own cultural legacy and the (medical) knowledge of our ancestors," Irawan said, as quoted by Antara.

"There is a 'wall' known as 'scientific logic' in the form of regulations on how to conduct clinical testing, a doctors' professional code and other bureaucratic requirements in the country's health sector. These present an obstacle between herbal medicines and patients."

He insisted that the unfair perception toward herbal medicines among the country's medical workers needed changing to help traditional drugs obtain legal recognition.

Citing an example, he said that in the United States there were 425 million consultations for traditional therapy in 1992, compared with 388 million with doctors in the same period.

Irawan suggested that instead of requiring clinical testing, medical practitioners adopt a more wide-ranging approach, which included the study of history books, to find out the efficacy of herbal medicines.

"That's why serious documentary efforts are crucial to provide evidence of the effectiveness of herbal medicines," he said.

Mawarwati revealed that Indonesia was endowed with some 30,000 medicinal plant species, of which only 350 had been explored so far.

There were 807 factories producing traditional herbal medicines at the end of 2000, whose combined output was valued at Rp 1 trillion (US$100 million).