NIH Center to Confront Fears Of Herb-Drug Interactions
“Misplaced fear” about herb-drug interactions is keeping many practitioners from recommending potentially beneficial botanical medicines, said Josephine Briggs, MD, director of the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)... Clinicians’ apprehensions are largely unfounded, she said. Most interactions identified in current resources are hypothetical, inferred from animal studies, cellular assays or other indirect means. Concern is often poorly founded, not based on rigorous studies...The antibiotic overuse problem is another one for which the natural medicine world might have good solutions. Currently, there are about 16 million Z-Pak prescriptions per year, mostly for colds and other conditions for which they are inappropriate."
