This is difficult, and takes time to diagnose, since by its nature, depression is not an illness that can be cured with a ten-day course of drugs, like an infection.

Depending on physician's assessment, a patient may start out on a mild tricyclic drug, which can be replaced with something that has better results for more involved cases. They may also recommend concurrent counseling with a psychologist or psychiatrist, to work on underlying issues that have caused illness.

Some conditions, like post partum depression, and bi-polar disorders are chemically related, and even multiple changes of medication may not do enough to break through cycle of dark moods and thoughts. In that event, next recommendation may be for a stay in a treatment facility for depression.

Interest in medicinal herbs is on rise again and interest is primarily from pharmaceutical industry, which is always looking for ‘new drugs’ and more effective substances to treat diseases, for which there may be no or very few drugs available.

Considering very long traditional use of herbal medicines and large body of evidence of their effectiveness, why is it that we are not generally encouraged to use traditional herbal medicine, instead of synthetic, incomplete copies of herbs, called drugs, considering millions of dollars being spent looking for these seemingly elusive substances?

Herbs are considered treasures when it comes to ancient cultures and herbalists, and many so-called weeds are worth their weight in gold. Dandelion, Comfrey, Digitalis (Foxglove), Poppy, Milk Thistle, Stinging nettle, and many others, have well-researched and established medicinal qualities that have few if any rivals in pharmaceutical industry. Many of them in fact, form bases of pharmaceutical drugs.

Research into medicinal properties of such herbs as humble Dandelion is currently being undertaken by scientists at Royal Botanical Gardens, in Kew, west London, believe it could be source of a life-saving drug for cancer patients.

Early tests suggest that it could hold key to warding off cancer, which kills tens of thousands of people every year.

Their work on cancer-beating properties of dandelion, which also has a history of being used to treat warts, is part of a much larger project to examine natural medicinal properties of scores of British plants and flowers.

Professor Monique Simmonds, head of Sustainable Uses of Plants Group at Kew, said: "We aren't randomly screening plants for their potential medicinal properties, we are looking at plants which we know have a long history of being used to treat certain medical problems.”

“We will be examining them to find out what active compounds they contain which can treat illness.”

Unfortunately, as is so often case, this group of scientists appears to be looking for active ingredients, which can later be synthesized and then made into pharmaceutical drugs. This is not way herbs are used traditionally and their functions inevitably change when active ingredients are used in isolation. That’s like saying that only important part of a car is engine – nothing else needs to be included…

So, why is there this need for isolating ‘active ingredients’?

As a scientist, I can understand need for scientific process of establishing fact that a particular herb works on a particular disease, pathogen or what ever, and need to know why and how it does so. But, and this is a BIG but, as a doctor of Chinese medicine I also understand process of choosing and prescribing COMBINATIONS of herbs, which have a synergistic effect to treat not just disease, but any underlying condition as well as person with disease – That is a big difference and not one that is easily tested using standard scientific methodologies.

Using anecdotal evidence, which after all has a history of thousands of years, seems to escape my esteemed colleagues all together. Rather than trying to isolate active ingredient(s), why not test these herbs, utilizing knowledge of professional herbalists, on patients in vivo, using myriad of technology available to researchers and medical diagnosticians to see how and why these herbs work in living, breathing patients, rather than in a test tube or on laboratory rats and mice (which, by way, are not humans and have a different, although some what similar, physiology to us…).