The people of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, still depend, to a large extent, on traditional herbal medicine for the treatment of various diseases and ailments. This includes the use of plants for the treatment of wounds. Information collected from the traditional healers, the Sangomas, has revealed 38 plant species that are used for the treatment of wounds in the Province. The plants...

An investigation into the adequacy of safety warnings and first aid instructions on the labels of 122 made in Nigeria herbal remedies was carried out. The results show that 6.6% of the herbal preparations had correct and appropriate information on their labels while another 6.6% carried legible print size. Only 9, 1.6, 3.3, 1.6% showed dosage, composition, expiration date and indication to cons...

Psoriasis is a chronic, systemic and difficult to treat condition which negatively affects the patient's quality of life. Frustrated and unsatisfied with the conventional therapies, psoriatic patients start looking for alternative treatment which they believe to be safe and effective. Very common traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) appears to offer various topical and systemic herbal preparation...

Objectives: The microbial qualities of some herbal medicinal products circulated within southern Nigeria were evaluated. Methods: sampling, isolation and characterization of contaminating microorganisms was carried out using established protocols. Agarose gel electrophoresis was employed for the characterization of possible R-plasmids. Results: Out of the 18 herbal preparations 13 (72.2%) showe...

Herbal supplements are increasingly used in psychiatric practice. Our epidemiological study has identified several herbal preparations associated with adverse outcomes of antipsychotic therapy. In this study, we evaluated the in vitro effects of four herbal preparations-Radix Rehmanniae (RR), Fructus Schisandrae (FS), Radix Bupleuri (RB) and Fructus Gardeniae (FG)-on cytochrome P450s (CYPs) inv...

There is evidence that more and more women use herbs and or its preparations during labor. This paper reviewed the commonly used herbs / herbal preparations among parturient women and investigated if enough evidence is available on the safety and efficacy of using herbs during labor. A review of articles published between January 1997-2014 June was carried out. The electronic data bases were se...

Hormone replacement therapy and selective estrogen receptor modulator are the most common therapy for women going through menopause. These therapies though popular fail to relieve withdrawal symptoms such as hot flashes, fatigue, leg cramps and nausea. This scenario necessitates to herbal preparations as alternative which may lead to simultaneous intake of herbal preparations, containing flavon...

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use is common among adults, and recent reports suggest that 25%-50% of prostate cancer (PCa) patients use at least one CAM modality. The most common CAM modalities used by PCa patients are vitamin and herbal preparations with purported antitumor effects despite only modest underlying preclinical or clinical evidence of efficacy. In this review we pro...

Background and objectives: In recent years, phytomedicine has a main role to support immune system and in preventive medicine to decrease cancer incidence. Traditional medicine has a basic role to introduce herbal drugs to investigate in preventive medicine. Camellia Sinensis has two popular preparations, green (unfermented) and black (fully fermented) tea that among s...

Most medications, herbal preparations, and nutraceutical supplements have notable effects on biochemical pathways and may influence wound healing, coagulation, and cardiovascular function. They can also interact with other drugs. A large portion of the data available regarding the effects of naturopathic medicines is anecdotal. Marketing of certain products may be misleading and potentially har...