Eclectic Medicine

Eclectic medicine was a branch of American medicine which made use of botanical remedies along with other substances and physical therapy practices, popular in the latter half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
The term was coined by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1784 to 1841), a physician living among the Native Americans, and observing their use of medicinal plants. Rafinesque used the word "eclectic" to refer to those physicians who employed whatever was found to be beneficial to their patients (eclectic being derived from the Greek word "eklego", meaning "to choose from").
Therefore, "Eclectics" were doctors who practiced with a philosophy of "alignment with nature," learning from and using concepts from other schools of medical thought. They opposed the techniques of bleeding, chemical purging and the use of mercury compounds common among the "conventional" doctors of that time.

Gemmotherapy

Gemmotherapy-[from Lat. gemma, bud, and New Lat. therapīa, Grk. therapeia, medical treatment] is a form of herbal medicine that uses remedies made principally from the embryonic tissue of various trees and shrubs (the buds and emerging shoots), but also from the reproductive parts (the seeds and catkins) and from newly-grown tissue (the rootlets and the cortex of rootlets). In two instances, remedies are also made from the sap.
This raw material is taken in the Spring (in the case of the seeds, in the Autumn), at the peak time of the tree or shrub’s annual germination, in order to capture the various nutrients, vitamins, plant hormones and enzymes that are released during this process, and which in some cases are only present in the plant at this time. Some practitioners of gemmotherapy (they are rarely referred to as ‘gemmotherapists’) furthermore believe that:

• the vital energy of trees and shrubs is at its highest point when the new leaves, branches and flowers begin to emerge
  


• the vital energy is concentrated in these parts
  


• this energy in some way remains in or informs the resulting gemmotherapy remedies; and
  


• the efficacy of gemmotherapy remedies is enhanced or explained by it

Ethnopharmacology

When studying the effectiveness of herbal medicines and other nature-derived remedies, the information of the traditional uses of certain extracts of even extract combinations plays a key role. The lack of studies proving the use of herbs in traditional care is especially an issue in the United States where the use of herbal medicine has fallen out of use since the Second World War and was considered suspect since the Flexner Report of 1910 led to the closing of the eclectic medical schools where botanical medicine was exclusively practiced. This is further complicated by most herbal studies in the latter part of the 20th Century having been published in languages other than English such as German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Farsi. As it may be more difficult to review foreign language publications, many of these publications have undergone been incorporated into the US Food and Drug Administration's "FDA" determinations of drug safety. In 1994 the US Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), regulating labeling and sales of herbs and other supplements. Most of the 2000 US companies making herbal or natural products choose to market their products as food supplements that do not require substantial testing.