ABC Award Recipients Announced

The American Botanical Council (ABC) announced that two authors will be joint recipients of this year's James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature award. Co-authors, herbalists, clinicians, and researchers Simon Mills and Kerry Bone will receive ABCs 2013 award for the significantly revised and updated edition of their herbal medicine clinical practice guide, Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy: Modern Herbal Medicine, 2nd edition (Churchill Livingstone, 2013).

Created in 2006, the ABC James A. Duke Excellence in botanical Literature award honors the noted economic botanist and author James A. Duke, Ph.D. Duke wrote more than 30 reference and consumer books and was a co-founding member of ABC's Board of Trustees and currently serves as director emeritus. The award is given out every year to a book or books that provide a significant contribution to literature in the fields of botany, taxonomy, ethnobotany, phytomedicine and other disciplines related to the field of medicinal plants.

Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy is widely regarded as the first comprehensive, science-based guide for herbal medicine practitioners. Since the publication of the first edition of Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy in 1999, approximately 40,000 copies have been sold worldwide

 From our work as educators we recognized the need for herbal clinicians and students to have a modern text that balanced both traditional practices and modern evidence," said Bone, co-founder and director of research and development at MediHerb.

The new edition of Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy has been updated with relevant scientific and clinical data from the past 15 years. Revision were made to the sections on pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, safety and herb-drug interactions and herbal treatment for chronic disease states. This edition also contains six new herbal monographs, discussions o f conditions such as asthma, migraines and prostate cancer and innovative hypotheses on herbal therapies for inflammation and autoimmune disease.

There has been an explosion of information in the last 15 years," said Mills. However, most of it is laboratory based and of varying relevance to the practitioner. Our main challenge has been to wade through all this new material and process it for clinical relevance."

The award will be presented to Mills and Bone at the 9th Annual ABC Botanical Celebration and Awards Ceremony on March 6 in Anaheim, CA.