Welcome to Herbal Hypotheses. This new area of herbological.com is named in honor of David Horrobin, scientist and medical physiologist, researcher and world expert in fatty acids and prostaglandins, who died of lymphoma in 2003.
Only months before his death, Horrobin wrote about his cancer to the Lancet, including a critique of the methodology of using immortal cell lines to assay "in vitro" therapeutic anticancer agents because of the lack of comparability of such experimental systems to the complexities of cancer in the living body. In 1975 David Horrobin, always an out-of-the-box thinker, founded the journal Medical Hypotheses. Here is a brief extract from the first editorial of Medical Hypotheses:
The physical and chemical sciences long ago recognized that observations are not superior to hypotheses in generating scientific progress nor are hypotheses superior to observations. Both are necessary. While the ideal research worker may be one who is equally able to generate hypotheses and to test them experimentally, these sciences also recognized that such paragons are very rare indeed. Most scientists are much better at either one or the other activity. In physico-chemical fields this is fully accepted and the contributions of both theoretical and experimental scientists are recognized. In contrast, in the biomedical sciences there seems to me much ignorance of the way in which scientific advance actually occurs. Physical scientists often dismiss biology and medicine as backward and the biologists quite legitimately react by pointing out that they are usually dealing with much more complex phenomena. But I have a suspicion that there is some truth in what the physical scientists say and that biology and medicine are backward because they have relied almost exclusively on observation. They have failed to recognize adequately that observation is always more effective when disciplined and channelled by hypothesis.
and from the current Aims and Scope of the same journal:
Medical Hypotheses takes a deliberately different approach to peer review. Most contemporary practice tends to discriminate against radical ideas that conflict with current theory and practice. Medical Hypotheses will publish radical ideas, so long as they are coherent and clearly expressed. Furthermore, traditional peer review can oblige authors to distort their true views to satisfy referees, and so diminish authorial responsibility and accountability. In Medical Hypotheses, the authors' responsibility for the integrity, precision and accuracy of their work is paramount. The editor sees his role as a 'chooser', not a 'changer': choosing to publish what are judged to be the best papers from those submitted.
I once heard Horrobin lecture on essential fatty acids. My lasting impression was of his ability to seamlessly transition from the molecular pathways of prostaglandins and leukotrienes through to the most complex clinical issues such as schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases. That capacity to fluently connect the cellular to the clinical through a physiology of the whole organism without getting lost in either the molecular or the pathological is a vital core-element for herbal medicine today. Only later, reading physiomedicalist Thurston's 1900 text on "The Philosophy of Physiomedicalism" did I see how it was not only vital, but vitalist. Thurston and Horrobin, almost a century apart in many ways shared a common viewpoint of the limitations of the medical science of their time, and of the central importance of theory.
Western herbal medicine is facing the challenge of how to preserve its core principles while acknowledging the insights of modern scientific research, without conceding to what Horrobin described as the most "primitive and unsophisticated" aspects of biomedicine. Herbal Hypotheses aims to set out radical ideas, speculation and hypotheses about herbal medicine, based on Horrobin's recognition that theory is as essential as observation in medical practice, and by extension, in the development of a modern herbal medicine.
Herbal Hypothesis 1 is: Warding off Evil in the 21st Century: St John's Wort as a Xenosensory Activator?
Herbal Hypothesis 2 is: MEDLINE & the Mainstream Manufacture of Misinformation
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