According to wholesale data, Estonians purchase an average of 650,000 packages (or 20 metric tons) of herbal remedies from pharmacies each year. About 80 percent of these products are produced in Estonia, with the remaining one fifth imported. Every year, Estonian farms produce about 14 metric tons of medicinal plants and their derived medications.

An typical Estonian consumes 10 grams of herbal preparations and 20 cups of herbal tea each year. For every 10 over-the-counter medications, an Estonian buys one package of medicinal products, such as floral tea, dried leaves, and so on. Estonians prefer therapeutic herbs like chamomile, flaxseed, bitter vetch and cumin.

"Estonia now offers 80 single herbal items and 145 herbal mixes. It is true that we buy and consume a lot of medicinal herbs. Unfortunately, there are no comparable studies comparing our habits to those of, say, Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns, Poles or French," Ain Raal, professor of pharmacognosy at the University of Tartu and one of the authors of the study, told ERR.

He said that herbs are freely available in Estonian pharmacies. Pharmacists and druggists here also have sufficient scientific knowledge about them, which is not always the case in other countries.

"It may sound strange for Estonians to pay attention to such a thing because, of course, medicinal herbs have to be available in pharmacies; where else? But if you look around in Finland or elsewhere in the Nordic countries, we don't see this in pharmacies," the professor said.

"If we take Germany, for example, which has a long tradition of herbal medicine, even there not every pharmacy has herbal medicine, only specialized pharmacies," he said.

According to the survey, Estonians use various herbal mixtures mainly to improve their general well-being and mood (27 percent). In addition, 17 percent use them to relieve cold symptoms, 12 percent to invigorate the body, 11 percent to reduce stress and improve sleep quality, and seven percent to relieve minor digestive problems.

The most popular herbal preparations are dried chamomile flowers, peppermint leaves, linden flowers, fennel and marigold flowers. Some 88 percent of respondents use herbal medicines occasionally, and 31 percent use them weekly.

Estonians still strongly believe in folk medicine

Raal believes that folk medicine in Estonia was kept alive also during the Soviet era, when the development of industrial medicine lagged behind that of the Western world. "In the Soviet Union, medicinal herbs were recognized as a health tonic. Perhaps the fact that medicinal herbs were available in pharmacies throughout the Soviet period helped to keep this tradition alive here," he said.

"If we go back to the 1940s, neighboring Finland, for example, developed according to the logic of the free world. There, industrial preparations took over and medicinal herbs were gradually abandoned," he said.

This does not necessarily mean that the use of medicinal herbs is something primitive or outdated. "If we know how to solve situations with herbal remedies, which generally have very low risks, why should we prefer remedies with much higher costs and higher risks of side effects?"

While not all of the herbs preferred by Estonians have been proven in human trials, Raal said that not all of them need extensive research. "We all know that lime blossom makes you sweat and helps to reduce high fever. What clinical studies are needed?"

"If we think about what is the criterion of truth for a medicine, it is clinical trials, i.e. trials on humans. Certainly not all medicinal plants have been clinically tested. Now, if we take some specific examples of plants, chamomile, for example, it's quite well studied, and there have been not only animal but also clinical studies on this herb," he said.

At the same time, he added, the effects of chamomile have not been 100 percent scientifically proven, which would allow its effects to be considered fully established. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) considers chamomile to be a traditionally used medicine that is generally evidence-based and safe to use.

"Another example is valerian, which is known to have calming and sleep-inducing effects on the central nervous system. Human studies have proven that this is completely evidence-based. So ultimately it depends on the plant: you can't generalize one way or the other. We can't say they're all evidence-based, but evidence-based use is inherent in medicine anyway," Raal said.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!