Can Natural Remedies Save Money in Healthcare?

As reported in a paper pub­lished this week in PLoS ONE, Christopher Golden, ’05, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment has found that, in the area of north­west Madagascar he stud­ies, peo­ple annu­ally receive between $5 and $8 in ben­e­fits by using nat­ural medicines.

Though seem­ingly slight, those ben­e­fits add up to between $30 and $45 per house­hold, Golden said, or any­where from 43 to 63 per­cent of the median annual income for fam­i­lies in the region.

“We doc­u­mented peo­ple using more than 240 dif­fer­ent plant species to treat as many as 82 dif­fer­ent ill­nesses,” Golden said. “This data sug­gests that it can have quite an impact, financially.”

It’s an impact that may not be lim­ited to Madagascar, or other regions where access to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals is limited.

As part of his analy­sis, Golden also com­pared the use of nat­ural reme­dies with the prices that American con­sumers might pay if they were pur­chas­ing the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal equiv­a­lent online—where prices are typ­i­cally lower than on phar­macy shelves. To his sur­prise, the results showed that the aver­age American could save any­where from 22 to 63 per­cent of their annual health care bill, sim­ply by using nat­ural medicines.

“If Americans were rely­ing on tra­di­tional med­i­cines as much as peo­ple in Madagascar, it could save them a major per­cent­age of their health care expen­di­tures,” Golden said.

Golden, how­ever, was quick to empha­size that his study only exam­ined the eco­nom­ics of the nat­ural reme­dies ver­sus phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, not whether they were equally effective.

“What we’re try­ing to do is account for the eco­nomic value the local flo­ral bio-diversity pro­vides to peo­ple in this area of Madagascar,” Golden said. “We’re not assum­ing there is a med­ical equivalency—this study is about the per­ceived effi­cacy. The peo­ple who live in this region often have taken both phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and tra­di­tional med­i­cines many times, but there is a per­ceived effi­cacy for these tra­di­tional medicines.”

Measuring that per­ceived effi­cacy involved sur­vey­ing 1,200 house­holds in and around Maroantsetra, a city in the north­east cor­ner of the island nation, to deter­mine which nat­ural med­i­cines they used.

To estab­lish the eco­nomic ben­e­fit of each nat­ural rem­edy, Golden asked whether peo­ple would pre­fer to use the nat­ural or phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal rem­edy for a given ill­ness. If, for exam­ple, 60 per­cent of those asked said they pre­ferred the tra­di­tional med­i­cine, Golden estab­lished its value as being 60 per­cent of the price of its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal cousin.

“Certainly, because there’s no proof of med­ical equiv­a­lency between these treat­ments, it could eas­ily be an over-estimation to estab­lish these val­ues,” Golden said. “But the bio-diversity in these regions rep­re­sents a huge phar­ma­copeia, and there are many hid­den ben­e­fits to the use of these sorts of tra­di­tional med­i­cines. These med­i­cines aren’t being improp­erly pre­scribed or mis­man­aged, and because they’ve been used for mil­len­nia, we know they’re not pro­duc­ing any type of neg­a­tive side effects.”

The eco­nomic ben­e­fits offered by nat­ural med­i­cines, how­ever, may not end at those who rely on them to treat day-to-day ailments.

The cor­ner of Madagascar that Golden stud­ied con­tains nearly one per­cent of all the global flo­ral bio­di­ver­sity, mean­ing the chance that a novel phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal might be devel­oped based on the tra­di­tional med­i­cines used in the area is rel­a­tively high. The value of that drug, Golden said, could range from $300 mil­lion to as much as $5.7 billion.

“That raises addi­tional issues, about who ben­e­fits from the dis­cov­ery of these drugs,” Golden said. “In the case of the Madagascar Periwinkle, which was used to develop the treat­ment for child­hood leukemia, a for­eign drug com­pany came, took the plants to a for­eign lab and they are now mak­ing bil­lions, but not five cents has made its way back to Madagascar.”

While the ques­tion of their med­ical effi­cacy is still to be answered, Golden knows first-hand why peo­ple con­tinue to rely on tra­di­tional medicines—in at least some cases, they work.

“I have been liv­ing here long enough that I’ve used some of these reme­dies myself,” Golden said. “In one case, some scratches on my leg got infected, and it blew up like a water­melon from my knee to my ankle. My host fam­ily went into the for­est and came back with what looked like net­tles and put them on my leg. It was incred­i­bly itchy, but the swelling went away com­pletely and the pain dis­ap­peared. So these treat­ments really can work.”

Source: Harvard University release