Herbal Remedies

The recent popularity of herbal remedies has freed many people to take psychoactive drugs when their cultural beliefs (e.g., "I'm not crazy") may have prevented them from doing so. One of the best examples of this sort of reasoning is St. John's Wort, which is often used for depression.

On the flip side, though, it has also freed people to used other plant-derived substances for abuse. They relieve themselves of the belief that they are abusing anything because the substance is "natural." The most widely used plant-derived substance is caffeine, which is discussed on a different page.

Here are some of the other substances used around the world.

There are many reasons why people use supplements, and often these reasons involve several assumptions that include the idea that

• They are "better" for you and you don't have to put a chemical in your body (St. John's wort isn't any more naturally occurring in your body than Prozac and it has a number of P450 interactions as well.)
• Supplements aren't harmful and don't have all the side effects of "medications" (digitalis and belladonna are both naturally derived and fatal in overdose).

Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action. -- Goethe

Like many other substances, herbal remedies can act on certain neurotransmitters and are metabolized and excreted. A major difference between the herbal remedies and medications is that we have less knowledge about how the herbs are metabolized and how they act than we do for pharmaceuticals.

A recent article by Wong et al. (1998) provides an excellent review of what information we have about the supplements, which is partially summarized in a table.