THE NEED FOR HERBOVIGILANCE

Objective: This communication outlines herbal drug safety, interactions between herbals and modern medicines, and factors that contribute to herb-drug interactions, including pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic interactions and their mechanisms. Methods: The study reviewed the various factors influencing the present pharmacovigilance system in comparison with the herbs related parameters, identified the advantages and disadvantage of the present system and derived modifications which are relevant to herbal drugs safety, efficacy and quality. Conclusion: The present pharmacovigilance system, being structured dominantlyfor modern medicines, needs to be reoriented to include detailed differences of herbal drugs with the former. Major limiting factors include suboptimal compilation of clinically relevant Herb-Drug interactions (HDIs), scarce reporting from patients and the failure to promptly recognized HDIs by health sector providers.A well-documented HDI-database prepared from appropriate case reports can detect ADR signals effectively.