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How we research herbal medicine and peptide information
Published and maintained by Elevated Self LLC · Last updated 20 August 2026
Anyone can publish a list of herbs and doses. The question worth answering is where each number came from and how much weight it deserves. This page is that answer.
Where the numbers come from
Sources are ranked. Dr.Herb preserves source context in its prose and derives an entry-level badge where the wording supports one; it does not expose structured per-claim citations. Dr.Peptide labels regulatory, trial and community figures in its catalog prose.
| Tier | What it is |
|---|---|
| Regulatory monographs | EMA/HMPC herbal monographs, Germany's Commission E, EFSA opinions, FDA labels and the relevant CFR sections. These define what a preparation legally is and the dose a regulator accepted. |
| Systematic reviews | Cochrane reviews and published meta-analyses — the closest thing to a settled answer, and often the source of a negative one. |
| Named primary trials | Individual RCTs, cited by name, with the trial dose and duration. Where a trial is small, industry-funded or open-label, the entry says so. |
| Traditional use | Long historical use and traditional-use registrations. These signal plausibility and a safety record over time — not proof of efficacy, and they are never described as such. |
| Community protocols | For research peptides, some dosing figures come only from community protocols. Where included, they are labelled as what they are; a forum dose is not presented as a clinical figure. |
Readers can inspect the primary-source directories directly: European Union herbal monographs, Cochrane systematic reviews, FDA drug labels and PubMed.
How evidence is graded
Where the wording maps cleanly, a Dr.Herb entry carries a strength badge taken from the underlying reference rather than from a fresh judgement of our own:
- Strong — consistent randomised trials plus systematic review support
- Moderate — several trials, with some heterogeneity between them
- Mixed / Conflicting — trials that disagree, or a positive literature with a large negative trial in it
- Preliminary — small, short or uncontrolled studies
- Traditional — historical and monograph use, without modern trial support
- Not supported — tested and failed
In the current 314-entry catalog, 164 entries carry a badge and 150 do not. Showing nothing is more honest than inventing a grade, so entries whose source text does not map cleanly show no badge.
The preparation matters more than the plant
This is the single most-missed point in herbal medicine, and it changes what you should buy. Efficacy data attach to specific standardised extracts, not to the plant name. A trial that worked was run on a defined preparation — a named species and plant part, a specified solvent and ratio, a measured marker content. A generic capsule of the same plant is not interchangeable with it.
So where a named preparation is what the evidence rests on, the app names it: EGb 761 for ginkgo, WS 1442 for hawthorn, EPs 7630 for Pelargonium, Silexan for lavender, KSM-66 and Sensoril for ashwagandha, Permixon for saw palmetto, iCR/Remifemin for black cohosh, MIG-99 for feverfew, CVT-E002 for American ginseng, PSK for turkey tail.
We publish what doesn't work
A reference that only lists successes is marketing. Every app carries the negative findings alongside the positive ones — Dr.Herb has a dedicated section for the popular claims the evidence does not support, and it includes some of the best-selling supplements on the shelf: ginkgo for memory in healthy adults, saw palmetto for BPH, tribulus for testosterone, cinnamon for diabetes, "detox" claims generally.
There is a companion list of herbs to avoid taking internally at all — comfrey and the other pyrrolizidine-alkaloid plants, kava, ephedra, aristolochia, chaparral, pennyroyal, germander — each with the specific risk or injury behind the warning rather than a vague caution.
Verification, and what it caught
In July 2026 the original 122-entry botanical cohort was re-checked line by line against EMA/HMPC monographs, Commission E, Cochrane, EFSA, FDA labels and CFR, and the named primary trials. It found real errors, and the most useful thing we can do with them is publish them:
| Entry | What was wrong |
|---|---|
| Black cohosh | An 8–16× overdose — the entry gave 20–40 mg of extract once or twice daily against the monograph's 40 mg of herbal substance per day (about 2.5 mg of the isopropanolic extract twice daily) |
| Comfrey | A 0.35 ppm product-content specification had been misread as a daily intake limit |
| Gymnema | 400 mg was the daily total, not the per-dose figure — the entry had tripled it |
| Clove | Mouth rinse listed at ~0.1%, which is 10–50× below the EMA strength |
| Celery seed | Dose doubled |
| Maca | Teaspoon conversion out by roughly 3× |
Every one is fixed in the current bundled catalog. We are publishing them because a reference that has never found an error in itself has not looked.
How the research reaches the app
For Dr.Herb, the research guide is the source of the five prose fields and first-launch disclaimer. A parser generates the bundled catalog and refuses to build if required fields such as dosing or cautions are missing. The iPhone build copies that generated Android payload byte for byte.
Dr.Peptide uses a hybrid generator: it parses the research guide's prose, preserves compact catalog metadata and explicit overrides maintained in the generator, and writes the same validated payload to Android and iPhone. Its disclaimer is maintained in the generator. In both apps, one generation run keeps the two platform catalogs identical.
What this is not
- Not peer-reviewed. This is a source-driven secondary reference under continuing citation and reuse-provenance audit, not primary research or a peer-reviewed publication.
- Not a clinical decision tool. Dr.Herb's medication check searches the reference's own caution text for the drug class you pick. A blank result means our source does not flag that combination — not that it is safe. It is a lookup, not a validated interaction database.
- Not personalised. Doses are typical adult ranges. They know nothing about your kidneys, your liver, your pregnancy, or the other seven things you take.
- Not a substitute for your clinician or pharmacist. It is meant to make that conversation better informed, not to replace it.
Found something wrong?
Corrections are genuinely welcome, particularly with a citation — a monograph, a trial, a review. Email support@elevatedself.health and it will be checked against the source and fixed in the next build.