To be fair most herbal medicinalists tout the decreased potency of an herbal drug as a major benefit. You're usually instructed to, for example, drink some amount of some tea for a month. It might be hard to predict the content of a dose but with most herbs even if you tried to overdose you'd probably just puke out all that plant matter rather than actually die
Every year there's between 10 and 60 total fatalities due to plant and mushroom poisoning annually in the United States. But more than 106,000 persons in the U.S. died from drug-involved overdose in 2021. Obviously many more people take pharmaceutical drugs than take herbal medicines, but I do think that even if you adjusted the numbers to account for that you'd still see a huge difference
The fact is humans have been eating plant matter for millions of years and even though secondary metabolites of plants can be unique, they still often have certain chemical properties that our digestive system can evolve to account for. For example oxalic acid (rhubarb, brown rice, almonds, etc) and saponins (beans, asparagus, spinach, etc) are two very lethal poisons that will kill your cat but that us omnivores have evolved to neutralize and most of us consume daily. In comparison, pharmaceutical drugs are specifically isolated and optimized for potency and it's simply much more difficult for our bodies to adapt to individual chemicals like this (especially if they have novel chemical properties not seen in other parts of nature)
Every year there's between 10 and 60 total fatalities due to plant and mushroom poisoning annually in the United States. But more than 106,000 persons in the U.S. died from drug-involved overdose in 2021. Obviously many more people take pharmaceutical drugs than take herbal medicines, but I do think that even if you adjusted the numbers to account for that you'd still see a huge difference
The fact is humans have been eating plant matter for millions of years and even though secondary metabolites of plants can be unique, they still often have certain chemical properties that our digestive system can evolve to account for. For example oxalic acid (rhubarb, brown rice, almonds, etc) and saponins (beans, asparagus, spinach, etc) are two very lethal poisons that will kill your cat but that us omnivores have evolved to neutralize and most of us consume daily. In comparison, pharmaceutical drugs are specifically isolated and optimized for potency and it's simply much more difficult for our bodies to adapt to individual chemicals like this (especially if they have novel chemical properties not seen in other parts of nature)