April update

A few months ago I updated readers on the situation regarding the elimination of herbal remedies and supplements from stores across Europe, as from May.

Most herbal remedies will disappear from stores in the UK and across Europe as from May, which is when the new EU legislation comes into force. Every single remedy from the Indian Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) will also be barred.

Popular herbal remedies (such as red clover and chasteberry for premenstrual syndrome, hawthorne for cardiovascular health and meadowsweet for arthritis) will be gone from the shelves.

Only 79 herbal products (inclu­ding Valerian and Echinacea) will still be available, says the Alliance for Natural Health International (ANH), which is mounting a legal challenge to the EU’s Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive, responsible for the wholesale ban.

Under the directive, manufacturers had to license their products, a process that can cost up to €170,000.

So far, only 26 companies have licensed the 79 ‘approved’ herbal products, and pharmaceutical companies own one-third of them.

However, not a single herb from the Ayurvedic tradition, TCM and Amazonian traditions has been registered, and so will disappear from the shelves.

These traditional herbs include arjuna and bibitaki from the Ayurvedic tradition, Chinese goldthread and foxglove from TCM, and cat’s claw, pau d’arco and graviola from Amazonian medicine.

ANH chief executive Robert Verkerk is mounting the legal challenge on the basis that it is disproportionate, non-transparent and discriminatory.

So far, the non-governmental organisation has raised €68,000 of the €114,000 needed to fund the challenge in the High Court.

Also of interest to readers are these health information updates:

• Diet cola drinks, including sugar-free cola soft drinks, could be responsible for stroke and heart attacks. This is because the drinks use artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, which could be causing damage.

A study based on the lifestyles of around 2,500 adults living in the New York City area discovered that these soft drinks dramatically increase the risk of stroke or heart attacks.

The researchers found that these drinks were the one risk factor that remained after they accounted for other possible causes, such as obesity, smoking and lack of exercise.

• There is no such thing as a safe X-ray. It appears that even low doses of radiation, such as those emitted during routine screening tests, can increase your risk of cancer.

Doctors have assumed that the standard X-ray technologies, including computed tomography and angiography, were safe because they involve very low levels of radiation. As a result they’re regularly used for routine screening and scanning.

However, they are not safe at all, say researchers from McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, after they tracked 82,861 heart patients who had been assigned to receive at least one scan following a heart attack.

Of these patients, 12,020 went on to develop cancer, with two-thirds of these being cancers involving the abdominal and chest areas, exactly the regions that had been screened.

The researchers say doctors need to rethink the way they screen patients as the current practices ‘may pose a population risk’.

• Many men have been wrongly diagnosed with prostate cancer and all because one of medicine’s key markers is unreliable. The rate at which prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels change over time has always been one of the tests doctors have used to determine whether a man is developing cancer.

However, PSA velocity is a poor predictor of the disease, say researchers, and as a result, many men have gone through unnecessary worry, as well as further testing and biopsies.

PSA tests have been discredited, as they detect a very high number of false positives, finding a cancer that isn’t there, although doctors have continued to rely on PSA velocity as a reliable diagnostic measure.

A man whose PSA tests have risen should not worry unnecessarily, say the researchers, and certainly shouldn’t rush to undergo a biopsy.

Only those whose PSA levels are extremely high should seek out further tests.

• Finally, as many as half of the elderly people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s don’t have the disease at all. Which means they are being given the wrong drugs and treatment.

Researchers in Hawaii uncovered this dramatic over-diagnosis when they carried out autopsies on 426 Hawaii residents who had died, on average at the age of 87. Of these, 211 had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and yet only half of these people proved to have actually had the disease.

Lesions found in the brain were not consistent with Alzheimer’s, and yet, these patients had been treated as though they had the disease, said researchers at the Kuakini Medical System in Honolulu.

The researchers stress it will become increasingly important to get the diagnosis right as populations age and as more people suffer from some form of dementia, which may well not be Alzheimer’s.

kathryn@maltanet.net