Customer Reviews

PDR for Herbal Medicines (Physician's Desk Reference for Herbal Medicines)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This new edition of the PDR for Herbal Medicines goes beyond the first edition, published in December of 1998. While the first edition was somewhat limited by dated, unreferenced information, this one is much more up-to-date and includes recent references to the literature, such as the St. John's wort interactions with indinavir and cyclosporin that were just published this year. Each entry gives a botanical overview, describes actions and pharmacology, and discusses indications and usage in various medical traditions. There is information on clinical trials, and more material on herb/drug interaction, precautions, contraindications, adverse reactions, and dosage. Having a complete herbal reference is a necessity for physicians and other health-care providers in today's world - whether they want to include some herbals in their armamentarium or merely wish to head off possible herb-drug interactions among the patients who are treating themselves.

A careful reading of the hypericum section, however, revealed that several newer clinical trials were not included, while an old (1994) study remained.

In this reference, the physician would learn St. John's wort taken concomitantly with sertraline may lead to "serotonin syndrome," e.g., sweating, tremor, flushing, confusion and agitation. The likelihood of seeing this effect would be difficult to judge, however, since these anecdotal reports from the literature are taken a face value with little critical appraisal. If we don't know how many patients have taken this particular combination, we have no denominator. The inclusion of all material related to toxicologic effects is good for the sake of a comprehensive overview, but the drawback is to lose the feel for what may really be important. An example is the inclusion of a reference regarding hypericum toxicity when directly incubated with sperm or oocytes. Without pointing out that this very unusual study is not the way reproductive or teratogenic is determined during drug development, the reader may be left with the belief that hypericum showed reproductive toxicity. The reference to an interaction with theophylline might have mentioned that the patient was on a plethora of other drugs and relied on her recollection of events. It might also have mentioned that direct human studies of the 1A2 and 2D6 enzymes found no effect from hypericum. Rather, it stated that hypericum "...may significantly affect plasma concentrations of any drug that is metabolized by the cytochrome P-450 system." This is not supported by data. Also unsupported is the incorrect statement taken from Schultz et al's Rational Phytotherapy that phototoxicity may occur at hypericin plasma concentrations of 50 mcg/mL. This should have read 50 mcg/L (or 50 ng/mL) as the original paper reported. Also not useful is the daily dosage recommendation of 200 - 1000 mcg hypericin for depression; one might conclude that there is evidence for this.

While this book is sold as a mainstream reference it may be somewhat daunting for the layman. It's well-organized style and the provision of recent scientific and medical references will make it a useful starting place for more in depth research for health-care professionals. Perhaps the publication of an erratum could be recommended.

Being a licensed practitioner of Chinese medicine here in the US, I purchased the PDR for Herbal Medicines, 3rd ed. because I wanted to have access to western scientific resource material about the many (about 700) herbal medicinals covered in the volume. If you're looking for a good clinical or diagnostic manual for learning how to prescribe herbal medicinals, this book, by no means, articulates how to actually effectively prescribe herbal medicines properly. In order to prescribe herbal medicines safely and effectively, they must be applied according to a diagnostic pattern discrimination methodology that is suitable for each patient's constitution, clinical presentation and pathological disease situation. All that said, however, the book is an excellent resource for information about known scientific research, references to other source materials as well as pharmacological, chemical, toxicological cautions and contraindications for each herb covered in the volume. In fact, for this kind of information, the text is hard to beat. No one should use or prescribe a medicinal that they do not know the possible side effects and toxicity potential for that particular plant material. Although some naive individuals believe that all medicinal plants are safe to use, in fact, some herbal substances are toxic, contraindicated during pregnancy, should only be used for a short period of time, etc. This book has explicit information that is consistent with many of the best herbal medicine text books that I own. The book even has ratings by the well known German 'Commission E' board that approves herbal medicines in Europe for professional use. And if that isn't enough, many Chinese and Ayurvedic medicinals are also covered. There is also a section that covers many nutritional supplements on the market as well. All in all, I highly recommend the book to those who want detailed identification, dosage, usage, pharmacological and toxicological reference material for a large number of useful plant medicinal substances. This is a great book to fill in the blanks that many other reference texts simply do not cover.

I'm a former practicing pharmacist, now a health promotion educator who must, for my lectures, keep up to date on the rapidly emerging information (peer reviewed research & commercial publications, internet, etc.) about medicinals, vitamins, minerals, supplements, herbs, natural remedies, etc. available to public with and without a prescription. My goal is to ferret out fact from fiction. I believe THE AMERICAN PHARMACEUTICAL ASSOCIATION PRACTICAL GUIDE TO NATURAL MEDICINES is a MUCH BETTER (a FIVE star) resource--especially since it's a 1999 publication that cites sources including German monographs that are basis of PDR. The description of APA Guide, on Amazon.com, does not do this book justice. Once I got PRACTICAL GUIDE TO NATURAL MEDICINES I no longer used PDR.

I'm glad that someone put together an herbal PDR... I just wish they had done a decent job. This looks like it was written by The Little Rascals (Alfalfa and Buckwheat). First of all, the latin names are wrong throughout the book. No author of the name is ever given, the capitalization does not follow convention, and no effort is made to use the currently official names. This makes it difficult or even impossible to know exactly which species is being discussed, in some cases. And it makes it seem that the people who wrote it don't know what they're talking about. It is also interesting to note that the literature reviews which went into making this were not very comprehensive; the book will often say that no data exists when a simple Medline search will prove otherwise. Perhaps for the next edition, "Our Gang" should hire a botanist to help them do the latin names properly, and a medical librarian to help with finding and citing literature.

This second edition is the most up-to-date and comprehensive reference on herbal products. It goes well beyond other books on herbal medicines. It has a list of marketed herbal products with their brand names. It gives doctors latest research data from primary medical literature, such as Lancet, BMJ. I would strongly recommend other healthcare professionals to buy this reference book to answer patient's questions.

I'm not enthralled with it, but it is a decent materia medica with somewhat dated information. (The German Commission E was some time back.) It will doubtless be used by MDs as an authoritative source. Tends to be a bit conservative in application, warning against many good herbs which need to be used knowledgeably. The photos are all segregated from the text (like the drug pictures are in the normal PDR.) For general use, the illustrated Holistic Herbal by David Hoffman, Penelope Ody's Complete Medicinal Herbal and Andrew Chevallier's Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants are better values. If you are a herbal practicioner who needs to interact with MDs, the Herbal PDR is useful.

I just received this book. I'm a family physician and I get lot of questions about herbal products. This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference source on herbal medicines. I found infromation on new interactions between St. John Wort and cyclosporine, AIDS drugs, and others. I would strongly recommend other physicians to get this book.

This "PDR" may excite a few biochemists and hard-core pharmacists, but it has little real clinical value for practicing physicians other than bibliographies for each item. See Practical Guide to Natural Medicines by the American Pharmaceutial Information. It is about half the price and far more clinically helpful.

This book is a major disappointment.It's not that there isn't alot of information presented,but rather that the people at PDR took the simple way out and seem to have just literally translated the German version.The problem with that is seen when one tries to look at dosages and dosage forms.Instead of,for example,getting the most common preparations and practical doses for St.John's Wort or Kava Kava available in this country,you get a description of dosage forms not available in stores here.This is a major shortfall for physicians and patients actually trying to use herbals here.They missed a great oportunity.

As a pharmacist specializing in traditional Japanese medicine, I am greatly disappointed with this title. Apparently, the parts of the plants featured in the photographs are arbitrarily chosen and have little relevance to the medicinal parts actually used (e.g. Asarum LEAVES featured in the photograph). And the bibliographies in some monographs contain typographical errors in the names of researchers and periodicals in Asia, which render the overall value of this title as a reference material highly questionable.