Who Uses Medicinal Herbs?
But a lack of adequate regulation among herbal products leads to a confusing mix of products, offering different dosages and dosing formats, such as capsules, teas, and pills. Greenberger says some of these products are not tested for either purity or potency. Furthermore, each time a consumer purchases a botanical product, it is uncertain whether the product will work, or even contain the advertised amount of active ingredient. Keynote speaker Norman R. Farnsworth, director of the Program for Collaborative Research in the Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, cited a study conducted by the Good Housekeeping Institute and presented last March at the First Consumer Safety Symposium on Dietary Supplements and Herbal Remedies. The study looked at 10 popular St. John’s wort products, 6 in capsule form and 4 in liquid extract form, and found marked discrepancies–as much as a 17-fold difference–in the levels of the suspected active ingredients contained in the t
