July, 2005 Edited Excerpts from

A great concern in medicine is consistency, to the extent that this can become considered as the standard of excellence of a product. A product that meets a certain minimal content standard is often assumed to be a product of quality, though it may be of minimum quality. The objective of achieving excellence in process, content, and activity has long been a goal in botanical manufacturing. Those who sought to achieve this superior quality were often at odds with standard practices described in pharmacopoeias, while they were attempting to advance the art and science of botanical pharmacy. To merely concentrate the most active components to the neglect of the balanced complexity of the whole was not always considered desirable by these innovators. Such was the opinion of John Uri Lloyd, Eclectic pharmacist, award winning researcher, inventor, and former president of the American Pharmaceutical Association who pioneered many advances still used today in the extraction of drugs [his preferred term for dried herbs] to maximize the therapeutic efficacy: