Walk through any wet market in the Philippines and you will find, alongside the fish and vegetables, a vendor selling bunches of herbs whose names read like a pharmacopoeia: lagundi, sambong, tsaang gubat, ampalaya, yerba buena. These are not novelty items. For millions of Filipinos — particularly in rural communities where access to Western medicine remains limited — these plants are the first line of healthcare.
The Philippines has one of the richest traditions of plant-based medicine in Southeast Asia, with over 1,200 species used in folk healing practices that evolved over centuries, incorporating indigenous knowledge, Chinese medicine influences, and Spanish colonial-era adaptations. Today, that tradition is being subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny — with results that are sometimes surprising.
The Department of Health has officially endorsed ten herbal plants as "scientifically validated" for specific medical uses. Lagundi (Vitex negundo), a shrub whose leaves have been used for centuries to treat coughs and asthma, has been shown in multiple clinical trials to have genuine bronchodilatory effects — comparable in some studies to salbutamol. It is now available in standardized tablet and syrup formulations at government health centers.
Sambong (Blumea balsamifera), traditionally used as a diuretic and kidney stone treatment, has been studied at the Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care and found to have measurable effects on kidney stone dissolution. It is included in the national formulary of approved herbal medicines.
But the story is complicated. For every plant with solid clinical evidence behind it, there are dozens more for which claims of efficacy are based on tradition rather than trials. Some traditional remedies interact dangerously with pharmaceutical drugs. Others are simply ineffective — or effective for different conditions than those claimed.
"The problem is not traditional medicine," says Dr. Eduardo Quisumbing, an ethnopharmacologist at the University of the Philippines Manila. "The problem is unvalidated claims. We need to take this knowledge seriously enough to test it rigorously. Some of what our grandmothers knew is real medicine. Some is not. Science is how we tell the difference."
