Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains how researchers looked to herbal medicines when COVID emerged in 2020 with no vaccines or drugs available. Japanese knotweed, Chinese skullcap, and Andrographis made investigative lists not to kill the virus but to reduce severity. Herbs work differently than antibiotics: they're a plant's full defensive chemistry, multiple compounds at once.
Um, interestingly, when 2020, about March, when everybody was saying, well, we don't have any vaccines or any drugs for this new virus that's coming down the pike, I started looking for herbs. And interestingly, they had looked at many herbs from looking at the previous SARS epidemics. Not could we eliminate the virus, but can we attenuate it? Can we at least slow down and calm the death rate. There were a lot of herbs that they had looked at. And very interestingly, Japanese knotweed and Chinese skullcap, along with other herbs that we use like Andrographis, were on that list. So it just shows that, you know, when you talk about an herb, you're not talking about one chemical like an antibiotic. You're talking about the plant's entire defense system. So it's much more broad spectrum than you would see with anything else.
