Make a complete list of what you're taking, including nonprescription drugs, supplements, and herbal medicines.
This has meant that no system exists to track potentially life-threatening side effects of herbal medicines.
Researcher Katja Schmidt criticised another site for suggesting some herbal medicines could cure cancer.
The EU insists that in future, only high quality, long established and scientifically safe herbal medicines can be sold over the counter.
Herbal medicines marketed as weight loss aids have been found to include a drug withdrawn in Europe and US on safety grounds.
Other researchers at Mount Sinai have found Chinese herbal medicines successful in mice and are conducting trials on people with food allergies, she said.
Alternatively, herbal medicines can be licensed in the same way as pharmaceutical drugs but Mrs Croft said this is a costly and time-consuming process.
Much of the sales growth of herbal medicines can be traced to the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994.
An example given in this video is the reduction of local self-sufficiency in popular and effective herbal medicines such as Nardostachys grandiflora and Picrorhiza scrophulariifolia.
Not only will this information help local healthworkers, by winnowing what works from what does not, it may also increase international trade in African herbal medicines.
Authorities should reconsider whether herbal medicines, as conventional drugs, need regulation and should be tested for safety, tolerability and efficacy for the benefit of our patients.
Victor Perfitt, of the British Herbal Medicines Association, stressed that it should never be used as a treatment for clinical depression, only the milder forms of the condition.
By April this year, under a European directive, all manufactured herbal medicines will have to be registered under a new scheme to prove they meet safety and quality standards.
Bai (Huang Lu), a young woman who has recently graduated from a big-city university, is hired as a saleswoman of herbal medicines and accompanies her boss and a colleague on a business trip to an isolated, mountainous rural village.
In Thailand, only hospitals are allowed to research and produce new herbal medicines, and while Western drugs can be approved in months, traditional remedies that make use of any modern processing or ingredients may take a decade or more to be cleared.
In the 1990s several big pharmaceutical firms, including Bayer AG of Germany, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, formed alliances with Chinese research institutes or companies that specialized in traditional Chinese medicines, aiming to apply modern drug-hunting techniques to screen Chinese herbal medicines for potential Western blockbusters.
In the 1990s several big pharmaceutical firms, including Bayer (nyse: BAY - news - people ) AG of Germany, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, formed alliances with Chinese research institutes or companies that specialized in traditional Chinese medicines, aiming to apply modern drug-hunting techniques to screen Chinese herbal medicines for potential Western blockbusters.
Testing medicines is enormously costly: to try and do the same with herbal cures would quickly bankrupt the smaller firms that make them.
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