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Abstract
Herbal medicinal products (HMPs) are the subject of increasing interest regarding their benefits for health. However, a serious concern is the potential appearance of clinically significant drug–herb interactions in patients. This work provides an overview of drug–herb interactions and an evaluation of their clinical significance. We discuss how personalized health services and mobile health applications can utilize tools that provide essential information to patients to avoid drug–HMP interactions. There is a specific mention to PharmActa, a dedicated mobile app for personalized pharmaceutical care with information regarding drug–HMPs interactions. Several studies over the years have shown that for some HMPs, the potential to present clinically significant interactions is evident, especially for many of the top selling HMPs. Towards that, PharmActa presents how we can improve the way that information regarding potential drug–herb interactions can be disseminated to the public. The utilization of technologies focusing on medical information and context awareness introduce a new era in healthcare. The exploitation of eHealth tools and pervasive mobile monitoring technologies in the case of HMPs will allow the citizens to be informed and avoid potential drug–HMPs interactions enhancing the effectiveness and ensuring safety for HMPs.
Highlights
Medicinal plants and the scientific field of pharmacognosy always played an important role for discovering new chemical molecules with pharmacological actions that could be used as novel therapeutic drugs
Phytotherapy utilizes two different approaches, namely (i) “rational phytotherapy” that refers to herbal medicinal products (HMPs) with documented efficacy and safety based on pharmacological and clinical data; and (ii) “traditional phytotherapy” which refers to products
There are a lot of studies focusing on the subject of drug–HMP interactions and even if the pharmacological mechanisms are thoroughly clarified in some cases, the public’s opinion seems to remain the same, while the use of HMP products is still increasing
Summary
Medicinal plants and the scientific field of pharmacognosy always played an important role for discovering new chemical molecules with pharmacological actions that could be used as novel therapeutic drugs. There is a growing interest on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) which is based on HMPs along with body and mind practices (e.g., acupuncture) to improve healthcare. Such practices under different names are widely spread over China and East Asia (Japan and Korea), and continuously gain popularity in Europe and the USA [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. For Europe (mainly northern countries) and the USA, phytotherapy (i.e., herbal medicine) represents a separate therapeutic approach based on the traditional use of plants for medical reasons. Phytotherapy utilizes two different approaches, namely (i) “rational phytotherapy” that refers to HMPs with documented efficacy and safety based on pharmacological and clinical data; and (ii) “traditional phytotherapy” which refers to products
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