It's natural. Does it wrong?
Researchers from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Coimbra create the first world center dedicated to the study and collection of information on the interaction between plants and medicines.
Alerts to the Polymedicated Population is the focus of the campaign of the Observatory of Plant-Medicine Interactions (OIPM/FFUC) “Learning Health between Plants and Medicines”.
Several factors contribute to polypharmacy and accidents caused by interactions between medicines, plants or food and medicine. The most relevant are the presence of several diseases, which is more common in elderly patients. An important risk factor is self-medication, in which medical prescriptions are combined with over-the-counter medications and also, often, natural products are added which are also expected to have a therapeutic action.
Medications for hypertension, joint pathology, hypercholesterolemia, sleep disorders and cardiovascular disease are the most common in this polymendication. The elderly individual takes an average of 7 medications per day and polypharmacy increases the risk of iatrogenic disease (adverse reactions to medication), and it is estimated that the risk of adverse reactions is 6% when two medications are administered simultaneously.
A factor of great concern in self-medication is the fact that on average 70% of people who take so-called natural medicines do not tell their doctor that they are taking them. It is a common understanding that what is natural is not harmful, and not only do they not tell the doctor, they also ignore that the “tea” they drink daily can have direct interference with the medicine prescribed by their doctor.