i think that this would vary on the herb you are consuming and even how you are consuming or preparing it. The thing about a herbal preparation for medicines is that it often concentrates a medicinal factor from many (a bulk amount) of the herb.
As an example, you would cram a jar with yarrow leaves or flowers, or whole plant, or
root, or some combination, and then pour alcohol over it, and lid it, and then you would let it sit (turning it daily for a month or so), and thus some qualities of all those yarrow bits are moved into the alcohol and this is a stabilized form that you strain off the herbal bits.
Some herbal essences within the herb are more soluble than others, so one constituent might be more concentrated from the yarrow tincture, than another which is more dominant in the raw form, or when made into tea, decoction, poultice, salve, or oil. This might not be the case, the primary medicine is often the one that is concentrated in the tincture, and so you might get the same stuff in the raw form, though in a less concentrated volume. A nibble of fresh yarrow, on the other hand, is bound to give you a dash of it's goodness, and in a pure raw form that is potentially not at all available in the tincture since you just ate it fresh, so in that regard you might be getting quite a different medicinal
experience... or not (depending on the herb, and what you expect to get from it). That's the way I see it anyway. Some herbs have a variety of ailments that they work with, and some of them use very specific parts for those specific needs. As a fictitious example you might see that yarrow is good for such and such ailment, if prepared from the root, but not so much from the flower. So unless you eat the root, that specific medicine is not likely to be assimilated, and in that same vein and fictitious example and to bring the paragraph back to it's beginning, sometimes it is necessary to have a volume of the herbal
roots of yarrow to have a marked beneficial effect.
As another example, I consume
stinging nettle chewed raw, juiced (as well as frozen juice), steamed, fried with eggs, and boiled in a pasta sauce, and tea of dried leaves amongst other possible iterations. I'm sure that some methods are going to destroy some medicinal components of the
nettle that other methods are allowing me to assimilate.
The short
answer to how I think of it, is that you do get some medicinal herbal benefits by eating a tasty medicinal herb, but it might not be the exact same medicine as a tincture, and will likely not be as concentrated considering how many medicines are prepared.
But there are lots of herbs that are quite tasty, as well as medicinal. So, if we ate a lot of them, would we reap the medical benefits, or do they need to be prepared in a specific way to get the full benefit?
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