How safe are medicinal herbs? Find out

Should you drink Korean ginseng tea if you're taking medicine for high blood pressure? Will eating nopales (prickly pear cactus) help or harm your diabetes treatment?

Researchers with the University of Texas at El Paso/UT Austin Cooperative Pharmacy Program are providing patients and medical providers answers to these kinds of questions with its Herbal Safety Web site at www.herbalsafety.utep.edu

Research coordinator Armando Gonzalez-Stuart said the Herbal Safety site is unique because it is "one of few non-commercial sources of information about medicinal herbs presented in English and Spanish" on the Web.

The pharmacy program's Herbal Safety Initiative is funded by a $245,000 grant from the Paso del Norte Health Foundation. The Paso del Norte Health Foundation, created in 1995 to improve the health status of the region's population through education and prevention, is one of the largest private foundations on the U.S.-Mexico border.

There is a great need for a reliable source of well-researched documentation about medicinal plants, particularly among the growing Hispanic population living along the U.S.-Mexico border, the researchers said.

A study released this year by the government's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine revealed 19 percent of Americans are using natural products such as herbs, botanicals and enzymes.

However, recent studies by the UTEP researchers have found that herbal product use on the border is much higher than national rates—about 70 percent of patients interviewed used some kind of herbal product.

The researchers also found a disturbing trend: Only about a third of the patients said they told their doctors about their use of herbal remedies.

José Rivera, director of UTEP’s Cooperative Pharmacy Program and assistant dean of the UT Austin College of Pharmacy, is the principal investigator for the Herbal Safety Initiative. Rivera was inspired to tackle the issue of herbal safety after witnessing the case of a woman who was unable to afford her medication for high blood pressure. She decided to treat herself with an herb called zapote blanco that turned out to be ineffective. "She ended up in the emergency room with Stage 4 hypertension," Rivera said. Fortunately, the woman survived.

"It’s very common for low-income people to turn to herbs for medical treatment," Rivera said.

The researchers hope the Web site will help encourage medical professionals to ask their patients if they are supplementing their traditional treatment with herbal medications.

The Herbal Safety site is one of the few places on the Web where reliable information about Mexican herbs can be found. This is thanks to the expert knowledge of Gonzalez-Stuart, a visiting scientist from Mexico's University of Chihuahua who has devoted much of his life to the study of Mexican traditional medicine.

Fast Facts about the UTEP/UT Austin Cooperative Pharmacy Program's Herbal Safety Web site:

• Fact sheets for 40 medicinal plants are available in English and Spanish for lay people.

• Scientific monographs for 36 medicinal plants are available for medical professionals.

• Scientific publications and p