Chapters
Plenty of herbal products come with confident claims online. This film shows how the Australian Institute of Pharmacognosy grades the evidence behind them, and what's left once the claims are held to the standards used for any other medicine. Traditional knowledge is recorded as history and culture. It tells researchers where to look, and the Institute never treats it as clinical proof.
Three cases carry the film. Soursop (Annona muricata) has decades of cell-culture and animal work behind it and no randomised human trials of survival or tumour response, which is the gap between a laboratory finding and a treatment. For licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra), the graded human evidence across 14 outcomes puts the benefits at low certainty, and the one high-certainty finding is harm: regular intake lowers blood potassium and raises blood pressure. The last part looks at harms that long traditional use can't reveal, including the liver injury reports linked to turmeric and curcumin products and the anaphylaxis reports that led the TGA to remove andrographis from listed medicines. It ends by laying out the evidence hierarchy the Institute uses, from historical records through laboratory data to replicated human trials.