Usefulness of Herbal and Dietary Supplement References

Abstract

These results will facilitate the retrieval of useful information on herbal and dietary supplements and enable healthcare professionals to determine appropriate allocation of resources as they build a drug information library for handling requests about these products.

Community pharmacists in Australia: barriers to information provision on complementary and alternative medicines

“…Studies have evaluated some CAM information sources in terms of their usefulness when answering enquires in a drug information centre [17] and for overall quality [18]. However, no published study has assessed the best sources of CAM information for use in the community pharmacy setting.…”

Practitioners? sources of clinical information on complementary and alternative medicine in oncology

“…As access to electronic resources has improved over the past 5 years, it would be expected that the Internet would be used more frequently, although some authors suggest that there are very few objective, credible and reliable sources of on-line literature on CAM. [6,14] This is reflected by the universal low ranking of the reliability of Internet sites by all three study groups despite recent information that may indicate improvements in the quality of information available [29]. Patients are increasingly using the Internet to retrieve medical information [17,33], which reinforces the importance of oncology practitioners being aware of the quality of information available through this medium.…”

“…A recent report detailed results of a subjective evaluation of tertiary references for information on herbal and dietary supplements [29]. In this study, four drug information specialists independently reviewed questions on herbal and dietary supplements received by a drug information service and ranked the usefulness of 14 standard references.…”

A Review of the Use of CAM Therapy and the Sources of Accurate and Reliable Information

“…Following this exposure, specific pharmacy course work could be designed to address other skills needed to Three studies have evaluated the tertiary literature (textbooks and drug compendia) used by pharmacists in drug information centers to answer questions about herbal and dietary supplement products. [33][34][35] Pooling the results of the 3 studies, the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database Web site 36 was able to answer more questions than any one of the other available references. However, the focus of these studies was whether a particular reference was able to answer a set of questions, not whether the information provided was accurate.…”