Are Some Herbs Simply Too Dangerous? - This Week In Alternative Medicine - Alternative Medicine
A new piece in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine underlines what some herbalists—and a huge chunk of the mainstream medical field—have been crying for years. Some herbs and herbal remedies are simply too dangerous to be sold to the public.
In this piece Dr. John Cienki and Larry Zaret discuss the cases of two middle-aged men who decided to treat their own cancers with bloodroot salves. In both cases the men experienced life-threatening problems after the salves “ate” through their skin.
Bloodroot is a perennial herb that is found in North America from Nova Scotia to the tip of Florida. Botanically, it’s known as Sanguinaria canadensis but is perhaps better known by its common names bloodroot, blood root, bloodwort and puccoon root.
Bloodroot contains a number of compounds known to chemists as alkaloids. When bloodroot is made into herbal products those alkaloids remain intact and, when they’re then applied to the body, they “burn” off layers of flesh and form large scab-like scars known as eschars. This is what herbalists mean when they describe an herb as an “escharotic” or as having “escharotic effects”.
Bloodroot and other escharotic herbs have a very long history of use in removing skin cancers but they work by “eating” away both healthy and cancerous flesh. They can be very difficult to control and are never used by licensed professionals these days, thanks to far less invasive and far more reliable methods.
That hasn’t stopped their use completely, though. Bloodroot salves, tinctures and creams are still widely available on the internet and, as these doctors point out, their use can often lead to disastrous results. In one of these cases the bloodroot failed to work and the malignant melanoma had to be removed surgically—after the man had already subjected himself to weeks of what he described as “intense” pain from the salve.
In the other case, the salve apparently ate through the patient’s abdominal wall and emergency surgery had to be performed to close up the resulting fistula. (We’ll spare you the gory details on this one.)
Now, supporters of unregulated herbal remedies will correctly point out that this report only covers 2 cases but critics of herbal medicine will counter with the facts that these men delayed or avoided “legitimate” medical treatment until their lives were threatened by the use of the salves.
So we’ll just close by asking you this simple question: Are some herbs simply too dangerous to be sold to the public?
Source:
Cienki, J., Zaret., L. (2010). An Internet Misadventure: Bloodroot Salve Toxicity. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
You can read my response at the blog, and I hope you'll add your own.