Introducing: Herbal Safety website

UTEP (University of Texas at El Paso) has given us an electronic compendium of herbal info in a format that our abuelitas might never have imagined. Researchers with the UTEP/UT Austin Cooperative Pharmacy Program are offering a great new resource for patients, healthcare providers, and those who like to use medicinal herbs. It's the Herbal Safety website. The research is coordinated by Armando González-Stuart and is said to be unique because it's "one of few non-commercial sources of information about medicinal herbs presented in English and Spanish" on the web. The pharmacy program's Herbal Safety Initiative is funded by the Paso del Norte Health Foundation. Recent studies by the UTEP researchers have found that herbal product use on the (Texas-Mexican) border is much higher than national rates. About 70 percent of patients interviewed used some kind of herbal product. Only about a third of the patients said they told their doctors about their use of herbal remedies.