During a visit to England, the use of alternative medicines, particularly ayurvedic, unani and home remedies, by the ethnic. Asian population in England was discussed by the author on several occasions. A leading consultant in general practice in London, Dr James Bevan, who has in his practice treated many people of different nationalites and background, said that it is very difficult to know from the patients or form the tablets and capsules what plants and herbs constituted the medicines they had been taking.
This made it difficult to treat such patients if they came in with some complaints or if allopathic medicines had to be given as there may be reaction between the two. It is important that people going for a visit to western countries keep a note of what medicines they had been taking and also practitioner in the United Kingdom would have no idea how to deal with a patient who comes in with complaints possibly caused by a medicine about which he knows nothing.
Dr Bevan further stressed the point that medicinal plants are the source of several medicines widely used today in allopathic medicine system, for example, digitalis for heart disease. These medicines induce side effects if not used properly, therefore he felt that the herbal medicines used by his patients could also perhaps cause side effects if not used in the right way It would therefore be of advantage to the patient and his general practitioner in UK if he knew exactly what herbal medicines he had been taking.
Sir Colin Dollery, Dean of the prestigious Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital and one of the world’s leading clinical pharmacologists brought up the issue of the standardization for herbal remedies. According to him, it was very important that quality control of the herbal preparations being used anywhere should be rigidly carried out. Both the author and Sir Colin Dollery felt that thousands of the emigrant population living in the United Kingdom probably still continue to use the traditional remedies they had been using in India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka. Interestingly the same point about quality control was forcefully made in The Lancet of 9 July 1994 by J Bjorkhem and his colleagues from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm.
These scientists collected fifty commercial samples of ginseng sold in eleven countries and tested these for the presence of ginsenosides which are the compounds present in ginseng and thought to be responsible for its beneficial therapeutic effect. Suprisingly six of the commercial preparations sold in Sweden, USA and UK did not contain any specific ginesenosides at all. In the remaining fourty-four samples, the concentration of ginesonosides varied from 1.9 per cent to 9.0 per cent. The authors conclude that quality control is urgently needed for commercial ginseng preparations and other natural remedies. Both the issue of possible side effects of herbal preparations and the need for standardization of such preparations were also discussed at a
seminar given by the author at the Department of Pharmacology, Oxford on 12 september, 1994. That there is considerable interest in traditional medicine even in centres of excellence of western science and medicine could be seen by the interesting discussion which followed this seminar on “Research on medicinal plants in the twenty first century”. Prof. A David Smith, a leading international research worker in the field of neuropharmacology, now working actively to find a cure for Alzheimers disease, is Professor and Head of the Department of Pharmacology at Oxford, conducted the seminar.
Questions from the scientists included the potential cost of herbal preparations after standardization, whether urban migration in India would lead to a decrease in the use of herbal preparations, whether research being conducted to discover new medicines from age appropriately, whether combination of herbs actually used were also being tested out scientifically and finally what were the chances of new drugs being discovered from medicinal plants in the coming years.
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