Present status, Standardization and safety issues with herbal drugs

Abstract

Traditional medicine is an important component of the health care system throughout world. Herbal medicine is the use of medicinal plants for prevention and treatment of various diseases. It ranges from traditional and popular medicines of every country to the use of standardized and analyzed herbal extracts. Although therapies involving these agents have shown promising potential with the efficacy of a good number of herbal products clearly established, many of them remain untested and their use are either poorly monitored or not even monitored at all. Herbal-derived remedies need a powerful and deep assessment of their pharmacological qualities and safety issues due to the large and growing use of natural-derived substances all over the world. Based on the current situation, worldwide research on herbal medicine safety is still not broad or deep enough. For next step, more attention should be paid to researches on the toxicity and the herb-drug interaction of commonly used herb medicines, which are the most necessary and urgent work. For clinical safety monitoring, spontaneous reporting system or active pharmacovigilance is effective in identifying therapeutically relevant safety issues. In this paper, an attempt has been made to summarize the information described in scientific research conducted about Present status, Standardization and safety concerns of herbal drugs.