Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Plenty of mention of unsubstantiated or even partially invalidated herbs like echninacea, eucalyptus coupled with fluff and really surface-level ubiquitous information one can get in any herbal book gets "Herbal Antibiotics" my one-star review. Maybe I'm being too harsh but I believe it's foolish and off-putting for a book about herbal antibiotics to omit of any of the following: oregano, thyme, olive leaf, chinese scullcap, turmeric. These are among the most important antibiotic herbs cited in several similar books and substantiated by scientific studies on pubmed, nih and medical universities abroad. To fact check me, look up some of the 'active' molecules contained within those herbs: carvacrol, eugenol, thymol, curcuminoid in google- first hit should be wikipedia- read it then thank me for not wasting money on this book. I think it's funny how we herbalists cherry pick from recycled, syndicated, reworded-a-thousand-times-over information that essentially can be traced back to an historically-fascinating, folklorically-relevant but outdated 'A Modern Herbal'. Such is the case of the author's section on eucalyptus, which imo, is just intellectually lazy bordering on negligent. Why the heck, I ask, can't any of us herbalist seem to do actual, real research? Go deep or go home. I don't own this book thank goodness, I skimmed through it at a bookstore and rolled my eyes so much i almost broke something. Because it's so much like others- it's fluff heavy and thin on reality. A better book, "Prescription for Herbal Healing". Thorough enough. Right-headed, some good research there. There is an inherent bias among herbalist that says, "if it's called an 'herb' it must be 'healing' because that's what they do". I disagree. Some herbs are just fancy vegetables or pretty flowers. One would have to distill seven hundred thousand tons of them to get anything useful and effective in the body orally or anally (should you be so inclined) from them. So can anyone here name an active chemical compound in eucalyptus that has antibiotic activity? Ok I'll help. Cineol/eucalyptol. It has been shown not to be antibiotic, and too much in the body is instead toxic. The author is simply wrong in mentioning it. There is one reference to a study showing efficacy against rhinosinusitus. How? Because eucalyptol does reduces cytokine activity (inflammation) allowing your body to heal itself. The herb's not an antibiotic. Fool! How about this for a book on herbs as antibiotics: What is your metric for 'grading' the antibiotic activity of each of these? Does one show activity against listeria, e. coli, candida, some other class of microbe pathogen? Efficacy in vitro or in vivo or in monkey? C'mon folks, let's change our rubric to a more scientific one, otherwise doctors get to be right about everything, and our books-like this one-get to read like the same old hippie yippie bark chewing nonsense. What would have pleased me in this book, is an exhaustive biochemical assay of each molecule in every herb in the book. And I want each of those researched to exhaustion. No studies show efficacy, the herb sucks, toss it from the book.