ABC Acquires HerbMed

AUSTIN, Texas—The American Botanical Council (ABC) acquired the rights to the herbal database HerbMed® and its enhanced professional version HerbMedPro™. HerbMed is available free to the public, while HerbMedPro is available through subscription or licensing agreements; it is continually updated and currently features 211 herbs in the database, with information on scientific research, health conditions and more.

ABC has offered HerbMedPro as a member benefit to its academic members, and aims to enhance and further develop the program by integrating its own unique educational content. “HerbMedPro is one of the most useful and powerful herbal research tools on the Internet today,” said Mark Blumenthal, ABC’s founder and executive director. “Acquiring the rights to HerbMedPro will help propel ABC’s nonprofit educational mission even further.”

The database programs were developed by the Alternative Medicine Foundation and launched in 1998. The group’s president, Jacqueline C. Wootton, M.Ed., will retain her position as editorial director of both databases, while ABC will handle administration, financing and marketing of the programs. “We have been highly successful on a small budget, but we need a larger organization behind HerbMed to fully optimize all the features of the database,” Wootton said. She added the partnership will allow faster expansion of HerbMed including creating collections of data on health issues, modalities and social demographic groups.