asked practitioners about how it was used by their people before modern
natural healthcare products marketed it in capsules.
Safety and efficacy
Questions/concerns arise because recent research studies offer conflicting
conclusions. Aboriginal women today are among the women who are
concerned about hormone replacement therapy; many look to such ‘natural
remedies’ as black cohosh.
As mentioned, assessing the evidence of whether a herb reaches the level
of anecdotal knowledge is not easy. Two topics are noted here as illustra-
tions, both pertinent to an evaluation of black cohosh.
Evaluating recorded information
In addition to issues already noted in Moerman’s Native American Ethno-
botany, step 1’s preparation also needs to examine the often glib claims that
a herb has been used for ‘hundreds of years’ by ‘Indians’ and others. Careful
historical study is often required to determine whether this is justified.
Information on aboriginal treatments published up to the early nineteenth
century generally came from travellers who, often with some knowledge of
medicine, were curious about aboriginal ways. However, understanding
aboriginal therapeutic practices was far from easy given the limited time and
opportunities; thus early observations, although in many ways invaluable,
have to be treated cautiously. Moreover, because of copying by one author
from another, the frequency of references to a particular usage cannot be
accepted, without careful review, as providing the level of evidence that
reaches, say, anecdotal knowledge.
Specifically, with regard to black cohosh, early observers undoubtedly
found it more difficult to assess emmenagogue action and effects on
menstruation among aboriginal women than, for example, the obviously
vigorous purgative action of mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum). Yet emme-
nagogue activity quickly became noted as an aboriginal usage; it persists in
current promotions that do not necessarily take information from the most
reliable of sources. One is a quote found in Virgil Vogel’s still widely used,
if somewhat dated, American Indian Medicine(1970); it states that Indians
introduced black cohosh to early American medicine and that no early non-
aboriginal writers on materia medica ‘added anything not given by the
Indians as far as the field of action of the drug is concerned except for some
nineteenth-century instances of the use of the plant for treating smallpox’.^24
However, even a cursory look at nineteenth-century writings on black
cohosh suggests that not only was copying of information from one source
to another commonplace, but also physicians and, especially, the practi-
tioners of the eclectic school of botanic medicine contributed to black
cohosh becoming a virtual panacea for countless conditions within both
52 |Traditional medicine