SIDE EFFECT OF HERBAL MEDICINE
This volume covers the adverse effects of herbal medicines.
The material has been collected from Meyler’s Side
Effects of Drugs: The International Encyclopedia of
Adverse Drug Reactions and Interactions (15th edition,
2006, in six volumes), which was itself based on previous
editions of Meyler’s Side Effects of Drugs, and from the
Side Effects of Drugs Annuals (SEDA) 28, 29, and 30. The main contributors of this material were JK Aronson,
PAGM de Smet, E Ernst, and M Pittler.Leopold Meyler was a physician who was treated for
tuberculosis after the end of the Nazi occupation of The
Netherlands. According to Professor Wim Lammers, writing
a tribute in Volume VIII (1975), Meyler got a fever
from para-aminosalicylic acid, but elsewhere Graham
Dukes has written, based on information from Meyler’s
widow, that it was deafness from dihydrostreptomycin;
perhaps it was both. Meyler discovered that there was
no single text to which medical practitioners could look
for information about unwanted effects of drug therapy;
Louis Lewin’s text ‘‘Die Nebenwirkungen der
Arzneimittel’’ (‘‘The Untoward Effects of Drugs’’) of
1881 had long been out of print (SEDA-27, xxv-xxix).
