It had been slowing, but the change was inevitable. If herbal or plant medicine suffere discrimination in the past, it was the result of the haphazard, anything-goes manner in which the practitioners went about the practice – totally without scientific or empirical conclusions regarding the efficacy of their prescription.

Thus, much as some heavyweights in government and scientific circles were in support of herbal promote and were prepared to put their weight behind them, it was often difficult for these advocates and spokespersons to stick their neck wholly out. Why?

Because it was totally unacceptable that anybody should have the right to go to the bush, pick a leaf or cut a tree bark, produce a concoction and claim that it was efficacious for the cure of almost every disease on earth.

So sanity was needed. The fight to get this health sub-sector sanitized has taken decades, but at long last, hope is on the horizon; the future of plant medicine is now foreseeable.

Thanks to the likes of Capital O2, the company which has, for years, single-mindedly pursued a programme to give a scientific basis for plant medical practice.

Of course, over the past 10 years, many of the herbal medical practitioners have opened clinics where some form of diagnosis is carried out on the patient before the medicine is dispensed.

But questions were being asked by concerned health policy makers: what is the knowledge base of these practitioners? What, for example, did they know of the internal workings of human condition; what is the basis of their prognosis? So for most of the time, the herbalist-turned-doctor depended on the patient. It was only when the patient told what was wrong that they herbalist-turned-doctor prescribed the medicine

Once again, Capital O2 has ended all that. The company had refused, all these years, to open a clinic, limiting itself to the production and sale of drugs approved by the Food and Drugs Board.

"We didn’t want to pretend that we know how to diagnose when we didn’t," says Mr John Daniel Otoo, the CEO. He continued: "To invite people to come for consultation in a clinical situation, one needs to know medicine. For years our expertise had been producing potent medicines from plants. Then the patient who had already been diagnosed came for the medicines."

He was speaking to the Spectator two Wednesday nights ago at the luxurious Coconut Grove Regency Hotel in Accra at a ceremony organised by Top Brass and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NEPAD and Regional Co-operation at which he received a national award for his company’s contribution to the health sector. Capital O2, honoured in the Silver Category, was the only health sector companies in a list of 27 top flight Ghanaian and expatriate firms.