Botanical medicines

CAM. Data about 145 boys and 35 girls, with a mean age of 10 years, were obtained. The most popular form of alternative therapy was vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants (51%), followed by nutritional supplements (14%), herbs and botanical medicines (11%), massage (9%), chiropractic (4%), homeopathy (4%), and acupuncture (2%). (Horrigan et ah, 1998). An anecdotal report described the use of St. John s wort by four teenagers who were under psychiatric care (Walter and Rey, 1999). Three of the patients had been reluctant to reveal this to their psychiatrist, believing the doctor had no interest in alternative medicine or would disapprove of it. 

The Division of Health Interview Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, CDC conducted a survey entitled Utilization of Complementary and Alternative Medicine by United States Adults in 1999. The survey attempted to obtain a representative sample of minorities and also patients without telephones. This is important because these demographic groups tend to report lower utilization of botanicals products than Caucasians and those of higher socioeconomic status. The CDC found that 9.6% of the population took botanical medicines. Hispanics reported the lowest use of CAM followed by African-Americans, and then Caucasians 19.9%, 24.1%, and 30.8%i, respectively. The western part of the United States reported the highest use of CAM (15). 

The popularity of botanical products in the United States is reflected in a survey on complementary and alternative medicine that showed that American consumers had spent an estimated 5.1 billion on botanical products in 1997 (1). In the same year, the global market for botanical medicinal products was estimated to be approximately 20 billion (2,3). It has been estimated that currently more than 1500 botanical products are available in the U.S. market alone (4). This popularity has been fueled, in part, by the perception that botanicals are naturally derived products, and hence are safe and devoid of adverse effects. This perception appeared to be justified by a paper summarizing the fatality of pharmaceutical drugs and botanical products in the 1981-1993 period, in which statistics compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, the American Association of Poison Control Centers, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission showed an annual mortality rate of 100,000 deaths... 

McChesney JD. Environmental issues and methodology for detecting environmental contaminants. In Eskinazi D, Blumenthal M, Farnsworth NR, Riggins CW, eds. Botanical Medicine - Efficacy, Quality Assurance and Regulation. Larchmont, NY Mary Ann Liebert Inc., 1999 127-131. 

Institutes of Health for the establishment of a federal research program for the scientific evaluation of CAM. Now identified as one of the biologically-based therapies, botanical medicine became a research priority for the new NIH Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) (14). 

McKenna, D. J., Jones, K., Hughes, K., and Humphrey, S., Botanical Medicines, The Desk Reference for Major Herbal Supplements, 2nd ed., Haworth Press, New York, 2002. 

The Southwest School of Botanical Medicine http //www.swsbm.com... 

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