Herbal Remedies FAQs -- Defining Fingerprinted, Standardized, Guaranteed Potency

Fingerprinting is a process that determines the concentrations of a set of characteristic chemical substances in an herb. Knowing the relative concentrations is a means of assuring the quality of herbal preparations and often allows the location of harvest for an herb to be traced.

To standardize an herb, one plant chemical is used as a marker and extracts are produced to have the same, standardized concentration of the marker substance. This process is necessary because the chemical composition of plants varies widely. Factors that influence chemical composition include the plant variety, the part of the plant used, the age of the plant at harvest, and the growing conditions, such as soil, temperature, and water.

Guaranteed potency means that the manufacturer of the herbal preparation warrants that it contains the claimed amount or concentration of a particular substance. Sometimes this substance is a known active ingredient. However, sometimes the substance used to indicate potency may only be a marker substance. Purifying an herbal preparation to enrich it with such a marker substance may have no effect on the potency.