The American Botanical Council (ABC), an Austin, Texas-based
research and education organization, has obtained the rights to the
popular herbal database HerbMed® and its enhanced professional version
HerbMedPro™. ABC’s acquisition is intended to enhance the maintenance
and further development of the databases, which are frequently used as
a research tool by academic researchers, healthcare professionals,
institutions, government agencies, industry, consumers, and others.
HerbMed is available free to the public (http://www.herbmed.org/) and HerbMedPro is accessible through subscription or licensing arrangements from ABC.
“HerbMedPro is one of the most useful and powerful herbal research
tools on the Internet today,” said ABC Founder and Executive Director
Mark Blumenthal. “Acquiring the rights to HerbMedPro will help propel
ABC’s nonprofit educational mission even further.”
“For several years ABC has offered HerbMedPro as a benefit of
membership to all ABC members at the Academic level and higher, and we
consistently receive high praise about the usefulness of this
time-saving research tool,” Blumenthal continued. “ABC plans to
integrate some of our unique educational content into HerbMedPro to
benefit ABC members and ABC website users even more. ABC is deeply
grateful and honored that the Alternative Medicine Foundation has
chosen to convey its unique HerbMed and HerbMedPro databases to ABC for
future stewardship and development.”
Jacqueline C. Wootton, MEd, president and executive director of the
Alternative Medicine Foundation and founder of HerbMed, will retain her
position as editorial director of both databases, while ABC will assume
control of the administration, financing, and marketing of the database.
HerbMedPro is a continuously updated database of categorized
information on herbs. There are currently 211 herbs in the database,
searchable by both common name and Latin binomial. The information
within the database is classified according to key categories and
subcategories, allowing users to more easily find data relevant for
their needs, and the information is as comprehensive and neutral as
possible. HerbMedPro briefly summarizes virtually all publicly
available research information on each herb and provides links to
corresponding abstracts in PubMed, the US National Library of
Medicine’s freely available interface for MEDLINE, or to other online
research resources such as BioMed Central, Cochrane Collaboration
Reviews, and World Health Organization monographs.
“We have been highly successful on a small budget, but we need a
larger organization behind HerbMed to fully optimize all the features
of the database,” said Wootton. “The goal was to partner with another
organization with a similar mission.” Wootton explained that she chose
ABC based on its common goals regarding herbal education and her own
past experiences with the organization, which made her confident that
the two nonprofits could develop a mutually beneficial, synergistic
relationship. Wootton has been a member of the ABC Advisory Board since
2005, and ABC’s Blumenthal has been on the Alternative Medicine
Foundation’s Advisory Board since 1999.
According to Wootton, the new arrangement with ABC will allow her to
concentrate on expanding and developing the content of HerbMed. “It
will have many more herbs,” said Wootton. “It will be more frequently
updated. We shall create special collections of data on health issues
(such as arthritis or diabetes), modalities (such as Ayurvedic or
Native American medicine), or social demographic groupings (such as
women or children). Because the database contains multiple fields of
complex underlying data providing endless flexibility of use and
searchability, there are just so many different ways to slice and dice
this information and honor various herbal traditions and protect
intellectual property rights.”
HerbMed was initiated in 1998, and the original website provides
public access to information on approximately 30 of the most widely
used medicinal herbs, as well as a pay-per-day option to access the
entire larger HerbMedPro database. Wootton said she initially created
the database to showcase the vast amount of herbal research data
available. “I set out to counter the argument that there was no
reliable research information about herbs,” she said. “I could also see
the need for impartial and commercial-free presentation of the
underpinning sources of primary data on herbs, which can be browsed in
depth and on which medical and policy decisions can be based."
HerbMedPro access will be available to ABC members at the Academic
level and above (Academic memberships are $100 annually; $120 annually
for members outside of the United States) as part of their ABC
membership benefits. Additionally, HerbMedPro will be available on a
pay-per-day basis, a new feature designed for journalists and
researchers seeking information on specific herbs for academic papers
and news stories. |