Tea is like 3-5 minutes tops. Herbal tisanes can be done anywhere from 10 minutes to 12 hours. Hot extracted oil doesn't take too long but cold oils are weeks. And tinctures may take 4-6 weeks but also last for freaking ever.
Other herbal preparations include poultices (fresh or macerated dry herbs), essential oils (requires complex equipment and large amounts of fresh product, lasts forever properly stored) juices (highly perishable), lozenges or pastilles made with juices (complex, finicky cooking, lasts a long time properly stored), syrups (much longer lasting than juices)
Elderberry syrup, for example takes me about 4 hours if I start with dried berries and liquid honey. Roughly.
Calendula oil and hypericum oil both take eh a month? It's been a bit.
But I've left echinacea angustifolia root in everclear for close to a decade. A few drops of that into boiling water to help dilute the alcohol would light my tongue up for half a hour. Good stuff. Didn't take much to do the trick. If you have time to tincture, it's definitely more bang for your buck for many herbs.
But like, elderberry... Different forms can have different levels of impact. Capsules are fine I guess but elderberry syrup is more obviously effective and the most effective things I've personally used involved pure elderberry juice used as an addendum to tart cherry and a whole lotta fluids.
But honeybush tea works fine as a tea, i just brew it a little longer with some peppermint to ease sick headaches and congestion and lung crud. So good.
(I like herbal medicine in conjunction with Western medicine. It takes both to manage my diabetes, for example. And when I get COVID, I'm getting antivirals and I'm taking my elderberry and I do get vaccinated. I've found nothing more staggeringly effective for flu than tamiflu plus elderberry. Flu lasts 3 days for me. Wild.)
