There is often very little knowledge of herbs within the professional groups of physician-pharmacists in the Netherlands. People still only know about herbs as potentially dangerous, source of possible interactions with synthetic drugs, and are therefore mainly advised against using them in combination. The many countless positive workings of good quality herbal extract combinations are unfortunately not known (anymore) in both professional groups.
The herbal medicine practitioner, in his/her capacity driven and passionate to possibly determine the best effective herbal extract composition for the respective patient based on his/her in-depth history, wants to make a positive contribution based on the diagnosis and treatment strategy with herbal extracts. Therefore, it is often very frustrating when, after a lot of work by the integrative practitioner, the regular practitioner finally indicates that he/she does not see anything in the herbal treatment. But often even the herbalist lacks the necessary knowledge about the interaction between regular medication and herbal extracts, which makes communication between the regular practitioners and the integral practitioners hardly or not at all possible and therefore the decision is made not to use herbal medicine for safety reasons.
Knowledge of potentially clinically relevant interactions between herbal extracts and synthetic drugs is often purely theoretical and practically unavailable. A submitted case can thus lead to a search in all kinds of international medical databases lasting from half an hour to many hours, even days, and can then yield no more than a mere theoretical consideration that could be assessed by the pharmacist, in order to ultimately determine whether the combination of desired herbal extracts with the synthetic drugs can be safely combined in practice and under what preconditions for the patient this might be possible. All in all, this old way of working is/was not viable and would at best lead to an additional acceleration of the decline in the use of herbal extracts in the Netherlands.
This continuing education day by Yan Schroën addresses the complexities of this matter, ultimately arriving at a simple and practically workable solution for pharmacies and practices that does justice to the patient’s desire to be able to use herbal extracts in combination with synthetic drugs in as many cases as possible. The solution offered also provides a lot of guidance for the herbal practitioner, as the treatment risk is shared with the pharmacist, and the use of herbal extracts is not discontinued in as many cases as possible, making regular practitioners also discover and appreciate the value of treatment with herbal extracts. At the end of this interesting and intensive day, you as a therapist will be able to make decisions about the interaction of regular medication and Chinese herbs with more confidence and certainty and be able to consult better with the treating physician and pharmacist.