EFFICACY It is important that health professionals adopt a non-judgemental approach with regard to parents who use CAM for their children. Many herbal medicines may be effective as we know that many plant derived chemicals are the basis of conventional drug therapies. Parents will often use a herbal medicine for their children on the basis that it is more ‘‘natural’’ and safer. One third of par...

Key Laboratory of Development and Evaluation of Chemical and Herbal Drugs for Animal Use, College of Veterinary Medicine, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, P. R. China; Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Preventive Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA; Division of Microbiology, FDA—National Center for Toxicological Research, Je...

The hepatotoxic effects of conventional drugs are well recognised, but herbal medicines are often assumed to be harmless and are advertised as such. The error of this assumption has recently received attention in the press,' but we think that doctors are not sufficiently aware of the potential toxicity of herbal medicines. We report on four women, three from Edinburgh and one from Tyneside, who...

Traditional Chinese medicine-based herbal medicines have gained increasing acceptance worldwide in recent years and are being pursued by pharmaceutical companies as rich resources for drug discovery. For many years, traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) have been applied for the treatment of cancers in China and beyond. Herbal medicines are generally low in cost, plentiful, and show very little t...

The use of herbal complementary and alternative medicines is growing among Portuguese cancer patients, contributing to a higher risk for unwanted interactions, especially due to the narrow therapeutic index of most oncolytic drugs. A literature review was carried out in order to determine which medicinal plants are most commonly used by cancer patients, in Europe and USA, and their risk of inte...

BACKGROUND There is increased reliance on traditional herbal medicines by several millions of people worldwide, especially in West Africa and Nigeria in particular. This is due to escalating cost of good quality drugs and consequent proliferation of faked cheaper drugs. However, non standardization of production and handling methods have resulted in herbal medicines with varying quality and saf...

Herbal based medicines are used for the treatment of many diseases from ancient times while pharmaceutical chemistry is recently developed. Usually Herbal medicines have been delivered orally in both animals and human. Targeted drug-delivery systems currently more common for the treatment of most life threatening diseases such as cancers. In addition to drug eluting devices many nano based devi...