"According to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA), this indicates that the herbal medicine has been registered with the MHRA under the Traditional Herbal Registration (THR) scheme and meets the required standards relating to its quality, safety, evidence of traditional use and other criteria as set out under the Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive (THMPD) 2004/24/EC. There have been 92 applications since the scheme began in March 06. The most important line is this one:

Under this scheme, the permitted indications for the medicine are based on traditional usage and not on evidence of effectiveness of the product.

So, as I wrote before with homeopathy, as long as the seller can demonstrate safety of the product and a history of use for the particular therapeutic indication, then it can receive the THR stamp and be sold legitimately, despite there being no investigation into whether it works or not…On a positive note, any product with this mark on it will single it out clearly and obviously to me as snakeoil - if it were a *real* medicine that, you know, actually had some effect, then it would be marketed as such and would have some evidence to back it up. So, perhaps we should look at this stamp as a victory for evidence-based medicine, as it singles out products without any provable efficacy for all to see."  Thinking Is Dangerous blogspot (23rd October 2009)