Main Article
Herbal medicine refers to using plant-sourced materials to positively modify the patient's physiology to improve the patient's wellbeing and health.
There is a fuzzy line between Nutritional Medicine and Herbal Medicine - the former includes plants that are generally eaten as "food," whereas the latter includes plants that are generally considered to be medicinal in nature. For example, "corn" is generally thought of as a food, while "corn silk" is generally thought of as an herbal medicine.
It is important to note that many pharmaceutical drugs are either purified forms of herbal medicines, or chemically modified forms of herbal medicines. For example, "Lovastatin" is a pharmaceutical that is chemically equivalent to an ingredient in the herbal medicine called "Red Yeast Rice." Herbal Medicine practitioners generally believe that using "whole plant extracts" that contain a variety of complementary physiologically active substances is more beneficial than using the single-active-agent pharmaceutical drugs.
While most herbal medicines are derived from plants, some are derived from other life forms, such as bacteria, fungi, animals, etc. In fact, many important antibiotics are derived from bacteria and fungi, for example penicillin.