Preoperative Considerations with Herbal Medicines

Abstract

More patients are using herbal remedies. Even though herbs are natural products, they often act like medications and may interact with or potentiate other medications. During a preoperative evaluation, nurses should ask patients about their use of herbal remedies. Certain herbs are dangerous and should never be taken, and others must be avoided before elective surgery. Today's perioperative health care professionals must become familiar with basic information about herbs to carry out thorough assessments. At times, caregivers may need to educate and counsel consumers about benefits and harmful aspects of herbal preparations.

Herbal medication use in the pediatric surgical patient

“…[12][13][14] Of the 15 children using herbal medicines in this series undergoing major surgical procedures, 13 of these children were taking an herbal product with reported adverse effects, placing these 13 children at an increased risk for a potential perioperative complication, although none were confirmed to have one. The most frequently used herbal medications reported were echinacea (14.6%), chamomile (10.1%), and aloe (7.9%), and a full list of herbal products reported is shown in Table 2.…”

Challenges in developing medicinal plant databases for sharing ethnopharmacological knowledge

“…Such efforts can be fully achieved by collaborative works of healthcare officials, pharmacologists, industry and other stakeholders (Winslow and Kroll, 1998). Cross linking or integrating information elicited from Internet resources like the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (http://nccam.nih.gov/), American Botanical Council (http://www.herbalgram.org), US Food and Drug Administration (http://www.fda.gov), US Pharmacopeia (http://www.usp.org) (Elvin-Lewis, 2001;Murphy, 1999) could contribute immensely in such endeavour.…”

Untitled

“…The acceptance and recognition of natural medicine has been in part due to the acknowledgement of the value of traditional and indigenous pharmacopoeias, the incorporation of some medicines derived from these sources into pharmaceuticals 17,18 , the need to make health care affordable for the Available online on www.ijpsr.com 3 community people and the perception that pharmaceutical drugs are increasingly over prescribed, expensive and even dangerous. Another important perception fomenting this interest is that natural remedies are somehow safer and more efficacious with least side effects than remedies that are pharmaceutically derived 19,20 .…”