Why Herbal Medicines Can Cause Serious Harm

Specialists from the Mayo Clinic have written an authoritative review on how herbal products can interact with medications used in cardiovascular patients, with possibly dangerous results.  It’s published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology; here are some highlights.  

More than 15 million people in the USA take herbal medicines or mega-doses of vitamins.  There’s a false sense of safety about these treatments, as they’re considered “natural”.  But this can be far from the truth.  And what makes the situation worse is the failure of the patient to disclose their use of herbal remedies to their physicians.  The cardiovascular field provides several examples of potentially serious interactions between herbal remedies and cardiovascular medications:

• ·       St John’s wort, used for depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders, reduces the effectiveness of medications used to treat heart rhythm disturbances, high blood pressure, or raised blood cholesterol.  This is because St John’s wort increases the activity of a liver enzyme (cytochrome-P450) that’s responsible for removing or breaking down such medications.
• ·       Ginkgo biloba, widely used for a number of perceived disorders, increases the risk of bleeding in people taking anti-clotting agents like warfarin or aspirin.
• ·       Garlic, taken to boost the immune system as well as for high cholesterol and blood pressure, can also increase the risk of bleeding in people on warfarin.
• ·       Grapefruit juice has an inhibitory effect on the liver drug-metabolizing enzymes, so that people taking several medications may be at risk of experiencing an “overdose”, due to delayed removal of the active drug from the blood.   

In all, the researchers identified 27 herbal products that patients with cardiovascular disease should avoid.  Apart from the four above, they include green tea, capsicum pepper, licorice, motherwort, ginseng, hawthorn, saw palmetto, danshen, echinacea, tetrandrine, aconite, yohimbine, gynura, black cohosh, and kelp.

Remember, herbal medications have not been proved to be effective, except in a few instances (St John’s wort and saw palmetto are the best known).  Nor has their safety been examined as extensively as that of drugs approved by the FDA.  So my recommendation is: save your money!