My Son:
Herbal Ed Smith
From Williams,Oregon
Herbalists
bring U.S. intoMedical step with the world
By Eric
Slater
Of the Daily
Courier
When Ed and
Sara Smith began concocting herbal medicine in their Williams kitchen in the late 1970s
and selling them out of the back of there van. locals took them to be just a couple of
lost hippies.
'They don't
think that anymore,'says Ed. In fourteen years, the Herb Pharm has grown like a swatch of
dandelion-which, by the way, is an herb Ed is rather fond off. 'The same thing people
spend billions to get rid of I make money with," he says.
The couples
kitchen--born company is now a multi million-dollar enterprise, manufactering and selling
more than 200herbal products intended to help with problems from menopause to anxiety.
What they do
at the blue roofed Williams complex with its own landscaped herb garden is very simple, Ed
says. We're doing nothing you don't do with a tea bag.'
This means
extracting the important ingredients of the herb into a solution and
discarding--composting in this case--the remaining plant fibers.
By
concentrating the important chemicals and putting them in liquid form, 'you can get
several ounces of herbs in a one ounce bottle,'says Ed.
The
herbs-whether picked from the front yard, harvested by local farmers who grow specifically
for the company, or purchased by Ed at the Misir Carsis spice bazaar in Istanbul,
Turkey-go through different processes depending on what works to extract the essence.
Some plants
or petals or roots are dried first: others must be proccessed as soon as they arrive.
Still others , like cascara sagrada (sacred bark) are aged for up to a year. They are
ground, filtered and steeped for two to four weeks in a solution of grain alcohol or olive
oil. They are filtered again before packaging and shipping.
In most of
the world herbal medicine is common place
According to
Ed the World Health Organizaton reports that three out of four on the planet use herbal
medicine as their primary source of health care.
In the United
States though just one and a half percent of the population use herbal medicine. 'We just
went through the herbal dark ages,' says Ed.
Even in the
United States, before modern medicine, herbs were the treatment of choice Ed reports
studying turn of the century manuels of such giants as Squibb and Parker Davis for his
early knowledge of herbs
"NOW HE
WRITES THE MANUELS HIMSELF. "
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