published: Friday, September 05, 2008

Natural Medicine

by Michael Visconti, A.P., N.P.

In the news this week a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association talks about how Aurvedic herbal formulas in the US have been shown to have high levels of Mercury, Lead and Arsenic exceeding the daily allowable levels of the toxins.

Aurveda is a type of medicine that predates Chinese Medicine by 5000 - 8000 years. Historians date the Aurvedic system of medicine at roughly 10,000 years ago.

We think our modern medicine is in infancy when compared to Chinsese Medicine... it isn't even out of the womb when compared to the Indian system.

I hate to agree with JAMA, but there are some things that come out of a report like this that need to be addressed.

These supplements have the potential to cause health problems in people taking them. What is even worse is the fact that some of the manufacturers are US based.

There was an issue a few years back regarding high levels of heavy metals and toxins found in herbal formulas coming out of China, but there was no problem with the Chinese formulas that were manufactured here.

In this week's report there were US manufactured supplements that also had high levels of the above toxins. What is worse is that 75% of these manufacturers also had Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) certification.

This is a certification that shows the manufacturer supposedly meets a higher level of manufacturing procedure and therefore should have more reliable products.

The conclusion that the authors of the report come to is that Congress should revisit the regulation of supplement quality. I agree with this statement.

This is not about regulating or restricting access to supplements for the general public, I do not agree with that. There should be higher standards that regulate the quality of what we are taking.

I only use supplements from a handful of companies that I can vouch for. I know the people who run the companies or know colleagues who can vouch for the company. I do this because there is no regulation on quality of a supplement so the companies must police themselves.

There are many reports from labs that do assays on supplements showing that the supplement has less of a particular substance than it says on the bottle.

There are even some that don't have any of the substance in the bottle that is on the label, the supplement is completely different than the one you are supposed to be buying.

This is happening even with well known companies you would not necessarily think of, but it is because of poor regulation.

What can we do about this? For now obtain your supplements from people and companies that can provide you with reports showing their processes and quality controls. It may be a lie but at least they took an extra step in the process they didn't have to.

Next, support better quality control regulations on the supplement companies. Again, we do not want to regulate access to the public -- we are concerned with quality.

Third, use your head, if you are getting supplements at "next to nothing" you are probably getting what you are paying for and you may be getting more than you bargained for in the process. It's your life. It's your health!