How Safe Are Herbal Supplements?

From ABC News:

In many cases, (Dr. Tod) Cooperman’s group has found that some name-brand supplements contain only a fraction of the ingredient on their labels — if any at all.

“Some have none, some have 80 percent, some have 20 percent,” Cooperman said.

Another problem with supplements involves contamination. In two separate cases last month, pesticide residue was found in a batch of ginseng at a distributor in New Jersey, and toxic heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic were discovered in herbal supplements on sale in stores in the Boston area.

And how about this:

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, signed into law in 1994, determined that supplements should be regulated not like drugs, but like foods. By making this determination, according to today’s IOM report, supplement manufacturers were exempt under DSHEA from conducting any safety or efficacy testing.

To many industry critics, the net effect of DSHEA has been to limit the FDA’s role to a reactive, post-market role. Only after the FDA determines that a substance, when used as recommended, presents a risk to consumers can the agency remove it from the market.

And because manufacturers are not required to report adverse effects from a substance, the burden for proving that a substance is harmful falls to the FDA.

Or this:

“As I see it, the main effect of the DSHEA has been to allow supplement companies to run rampant and make claims that are not substantiated,” said Dr. Kevin Scott Ferentz, residency director in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

“They sell products that do not contain what they are supposed to. They do not have efficacy data, safety data, quality control data, or anything that any pharmaceutical product in American must have,” he said. “There are few, if any, supplements that have a data base that is sufficient to recommend their use.”
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And Ferentz notes that no dietary supplement should be considered a panacea. “People want to think there is a magic pill out there for everything,” he said. “They assume that because something is a ‘natural supplement’ that it has to be safe and effective. Nothing could be further from the truth.”