The importance of learning about natural therapies...

For my final blog posting of the course, I wanted to take the opportunity to express my gratitude for the instruction on the use of Natural Standard. As someone who works in a chain retail pharmacy with a fairly well-stocked herbal and natural remedies area, I can tell you that I get a lot of questions concerning the various herbal and natural products that we stock. It's important that we as pharmacists have a trusted resource we can turn to when we get these questions, since there are too many different herbal and natural products out there to expect a pharmacist to be able to keep track of. While there is still much to be desired in the field of research concerning the safety and efficacy of these products, a site like Natural Standard is probably the best we have, and is nonetheless very helpful. I particularly like the feature of "letter grading" the levels of evidence concerning the various uses of herbals, as it provides a quick and easy way to assess the efficacy of these products. I also appreciate different monographs will different levels of detail. Often times in a retail pharmacy there is not a lot of time to pore into the details of a certain herbal product, and so the quick monograph would be a lot more helpful in that situation. However, if one has time and wished to go more in-depth, that option is available as well. In addition, you can also print off handouts in layman's terms to give to patients so that they can better understand a given herbal or natural product.

In short, while there is still a lot of research that needs to be done on herbal and natural products to more fully understand their effects, in the meantime resources like this are very important for pharmacists and other clinicians to help their patients. I am glad for the opportunity to learn about this product, and look forward to using it in the future.