For Your Health: Stay Safe with Your Herbs

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Dangerous herbs. Poor quality control. Toxic supplements.

If you read the newspaper or watch television, you’ll ­encounter these and similar phrases that have fueled understandable worry among many consumers.

At Helios Health Center, a holistic medical practice in Boulder, Colorado, several patients have told Robert Rountree, M.D., that they have stopped taking herbs because of negative news about supplements.

“They hear, ‘You can bleed to death if you take garlic,’ even if they feel fine,” Rountree says.

Seattle herbalist K. P. Khalsa’s patients have voiced similar concerns.

“My clients are really in limbo because they don’t know an authoritative source from another,” says Khalsa, board member of the American Herbalists Guild and author of Herbal Defense (Warner, 1997). For many people, even the family doctor may not be a good information source.

“Medical practitioners are begging us not to say [they are knowledgable about herbs] anymore because they don’t know anything,” Khalsa says.

Is it just a stage?

Some alternative health practitioners are perplexed—even dumbfounded—at the mainstream media’s recent treatment of alternative medicine.

“They focus in on a couple of problematic supplements like GHB and ephedra and extrapolate that all supplements are bad,” Rountree says. “That’s a pretty typical ploy. I’m so flabbergasted when I see comments like that from somebody who’s totally ignorant of the industry.”

Others are less surprised. Christopher Hobbs, a licensed acupuncturist and Herbs for Health editorial adviser, sees it as part of a larger process.

“The media has gone through cycles of interest in herbs and also where they put their focus,” Hobbs says.

Ten years ago, the media “discovered” herbs and coverage was often negative, he says. In 1994, the passage of the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act (DSHEA) sparked an explosion of interest in well-researched herbs such as St. John’s wort and ginkgo, and newspapers and magazines from Life to The Washington Post carried stories about the health benefits of herbs.

“Suddenly the media was on a honeymoon with herbs, and their virtues were extolled to the heavens,” Hobbs says. “Herb and supplement companies took all this positive media coverage as a blank check and began to make many extravagant claims for their products.”

These extravagant claims and a handful of cases of adverse reactions have fueled a flurry of worrisome reports. (See “The scary herbs—are they really so scary?” on 48.) The current backlash focuses more on the dangers, especially single reports of toxicity and interactions between herbs and pharmaceuticals.

“All of this is a sign of the immaturity of the profession,” Khalsa says. “This was exactly where the medical profession was at the turn of the century.”