Safety: Coordinating Natural
Treatments With All Your Medicines
We pay special attention to potential adverse
interactions among drugs, herbs, and nutrients.
Natural treatments, by and large, tend to be
very safe; but they are not foolproof. Nutrition and herbal treatments can
definitely cause side-effects, a few of which can be serious. For example, a
recent report from Germany suggests that the popular anti-anxiety herb
Kava Kava might be a cause of hepatitis. There's not yet enough information to
know this for certain, but it's important information to know, before taking
Kava. We must also be humble in our relative lack of knowledge.
Research on nutrition and
herbs and their interaction with drugs is still very limited.
Two rules worth keeping in mind:
- Any biologically active supplement has some potential for interacting with your medicines, or
otherwise causing side-effects.
- If a symptom begins or worsens
within weeks after starting a new nutrient, herb or drug, consider
that product to be potentially suspect. Of course, discuss this with
your physician.
An example: St. John’s Wort normally acts to
speed up the pace of certain liver detoxification enzymes. In some
circumstances, that might be desirable, but speeding up these pathways
can also increase the metabolic rate of certain drugs that also use these
pathways (e.g. birth control pills and cancer chemotherapy agents). Speeding up
their metabolism, in effect, lowers their dose, which could make them less
effective.
Natural products might also do harm in special
circumstances even though in other circumstances they may be useful. For
example, before surgery, you want to avoid most products that would predispose
to easy-bleeding. However, many valuable foods, nutrients and herbs act to
“thin” the blood (e.g. garlic, onion, ginseng, St. John’s Wort, fish oil,
primrose oil, vitamin E).
Being aware of potential interactions and special
circumstances requires special knowledge and attention–all the more so because
research on these issues is often dramatically incomplete. And new
information appears all the time. You can’t assume that anyone (including
ourselves) is 100% up-to-date. However, nutritionally- oriented physicians
are more likely to know the latest than are health food store clerks, or
several years old nutrition books.
As part of your "safety net" please be sure to
keep all of your physicians informed of all the medicines and supplements you
are taking. Our office will always be pleased to respond to calls from your
other doctors.
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