Herbs are one of the safest forms of medicine known to man. 

People sometimes think that herbs are safe because they're "natural," but that's not the real reason. After all. Hemlock (Conium maculatum), Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna), and the Death Cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides) are all 100% natural, but they're also very deadly poisons.

Herbal medicines are safe not because they're natural, but because they've been used for thousands of years, with millions of people, and their beneficial properties and potential side effects are generally very well known. Thousands of years of experience are to be considered. In a way, herbs have the largest real-life case studies of any medicine!

In our modern world, there are a lot of companies trying to jump on the trends to make a quick buck. This is a frustrating aspect of the industry, as bad actors give supplements a bad name. Quality Control is essential to the longevity of a brand, and we take that seriously at RidgeCrest Herbals. Keeping herbal medicine safe requires good formula design and specification. This means proper growing, harvesting, drying, and processing, as well as proper manufacturing and packaging. Failure in any of these steps can affect the safety of the finished product. So it's very important to know the sources of your herbs, and understand that the people who supply them are taking the same precautions that you would take in sourcing them for yourself.

At RidgeCrest Herbals we take our own products every day, and we give them to our own families. We take every precaution to assure that they're both safe and effective, and that they're always of the same consistently high quality that we would expect as customers.

Every medicine we take has at least one effect that we desire, which is why we take it. But that effect can vary greatly from one individual or condition to another, and a medicine that works well for one person, may not work so well for another.

Each medicine or ingredient may also have unwanted side effects, which can also vary from one person to another -- so one person may get great benefits with few side effects, while another gets only side effects but no real benefit, even though they took the same product at the same dosage.

A good over-the-counter medicine is one that works pretty well for most people and hopefully has few serious side effects. This one-medicine-fits-all, or "silver bullet" approach, has been the basis of Western medicine for the last hundred years or more.

Complex formulas are different, and though they're common in traditional Chinese medicine, they're less familiar here. Complex formulas use small doses of many ingredients, rather than large doses of one or two. Although people still react differently to each ingredient, complex formulas are more effective for a greater number of people -- people who don't respond much to one ingredient may respond better to others. And because the dose of each ingredient is smaller, there's less chance of serious adverse reactions, side effects, and drug interactions.

Well-designed complex formulas -- like a complex diet -- simply work better than large doses of one or two ingredients. RidgeCrest Herbals products are complex; our simplest formulas have four or five ingredients, and some have over forty. Complex formulas are more expensive to create and manufacture than simple ones since we have to source and test dozens of ingredients, not just one or two. But the results are worth the extra effort.

Using only the best quality ingredients, with extensive testing before and after manufacturing, our botanical and nutritional formulas are among the safest and most effective available anywhere.

No herbal tradition has all the answers. Because they developed in different parts of the world with different climates and plants available, each ancient culture developed unique solutions for various concerns. Some of these disciplines, like traditional Chinese medicine and Eclectic medicine, overlap in many ways, and round each other out. Others, like homeopathy and herbs or nutrition, reinforce each other, making for real synergy -- where a combination is more than the sum of its parts.

Our multi-disciplinary approach develops this potential synergy and pulls the most effective treatments from each culture to benefit our formulas.

Many health conditions are caused or made worse by nutritional deficiencies. Our modern western diet is only sometimes varied enough to provide good nutrition for most people.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that the nutritional value of many fruits and vegetables is less than half what it was in 1948 when they started keeping records, because of mass production techniques and soil depletion. Vitamins, trace minerals, and other nutritional supplements can contribute greatly to good health, especially when tailored to individual conditions and needs. Our products combine herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients to provide a well-rounded solution to the needs of our customers.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is probably the most comprehensive system of natural medicine in use today. TCM is one of the oldest medical systems, with literature dated as early as 2500 BC. It's also the most widely practiced natural medicine, used regularly by over two billion people worldwide. Traditional Chinese medicine is well documented, with many good reference books, even in English. TCM is also eclectic, borrowing useful ingredients and methods from many other cultures. In fact, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine have studied and classified over 10,000 natural medicines from all over the world -- much more than any other discipline to date.

Traditional Chinese medicine ingredients have been combined in many ways over a long period of time, so their characteristics when combined are very well known. In fact, most TCM medicines are complex formulas, not single herbs, and many such formulas have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. RidgeCrest products often begin with traditional Chinese medicine herbal formulas, though we modify them for modern over-the-counter use.

Some people, when referring to traditional Chinese medicine, are speaking specifically of a streamlined version of classical Chinese medicine that was developed during the time of Chairman Mao. While this is the most accurate use of the term, most people conflate classical Chinese medicine (pre-Mao) and traditional Chinese medicine, and we use the terms interchangeably as well.

America has always been a crossroads for many different influences. Native Americans had many herbal solutions. European settlers brought their own solutions with them as they came to the Americas.

By the early 1800s, American herbalists were also studying herbal solutions brought by immigrants from Central and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. As they adopted herbal resolutions from many different sources, these herbalists began calling themselves Eclectic, which means "choosing what's best from various sources or systems." For over a hundred years, the Eclectics were the recognized leaders of medical science until herbal medicines were replaced mainly by pharmaceutical drugs in the 1920s and 1930s.

RidgeCrest Herbals remains strongly influenced by the Eclectic approach. Our botanical formulas are drawn not only from all branches of herbalism, but also from modern nutritional science. We continue to search the world for the most effective natural methods and ingredients and new ways to use them together.