St. John's Wort Info

Again I say that I do not take responsibility for the info in here..... this is here for your information.   Please make informed decisions before you start taking meds, ok?

Check out this web site for tons of info all about St. John's Wort.

http://www.hypericum.com

Cautions before taking St. John's Wort:

1. If you are having suicidal thoughts, and you think you even may act upon them,
please get emergency medical help at once. Call a suicide hotline, your physician,
your therapist, your religious counselor, or 911. Suicidal thoughts are a natural
part of depression. Any plan to act on these thoughts is a danger signal that
you must get help at once.

2. If you are taking prescription antidepressants, do not alter your dosage or
combine with hypericum without first consulting your doctor. Do not take
hypericum if you are taking an MAO inhibitor. (Please see the chapter, "For
Those Currently Taking Prescription Antidepressants.")

3. If you have a preexisting medical or psychiatric condition, please consult
your doctor before taking hypericum.

4. Although they are few and generally mild, you should carefully consider the
side effects  of hypericum before taking it. Please read the chapter, "The Side
Effects of Hypericum." 

>From the side effects page
http://www.hypericum.com/hyp12.htm

As to toxicity, hypericum is safer than aspirin. Five hundred to one thousand
people die each year in the United States from aspirin, usually from internal
bleeding. Hypericum, by comparison, does not have a single recorded human
death in 2,400 years of known medicinal use.

In fact, the only fatal toxicity known is in certain light-skinned animals, such
a sheep, who die not from ingesting large quantities of St. John's wort while
grazing, but of exposure to sun after. (This is why hypericum is considered a dangerous
weed in Australia and is listed in Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of
North America, by Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski.) Hypericum
increases the animals' susceptibility to sunlight, and they become sick and
sometimes die from extreme sunburn. Medically, it's known as phototoxicity --
the overexposure to light (photo) is harmful (toxic).

This phenomenon, while theoretically possible in humans, has not been
documented in the recommended doses for depression. Not a single case of
phototoxicity has been reported in human medical studies at depression-dosage
levels. Even in AIDS research involving intravenous hypericum doses thirty-five
times greater than the recommended dose for depression, the phototoxic effects
have been few and never deadly. (High doses of hypericum are being medically
investigated for its antiviral properties.)

The potential for phototoxicity should be kept in mind, however, if one has a
prior hypersensitivity to sunlight, or if one is taking other photosensitizing drugs
such as Chlorpromazine and Tetracyclines.

In a study of 3,250 patients taking hypericum, only 2.4 percent experienced any
side effects at all.

The side effects reported tended to be mild. Gastrointestinal irritations
accounted for 0.6 percent, allergic reactions for 0.5 percent, tiredness for 0.4 percent,
and restlessness for 0.3 percent.

(Interestingly, in fifteen studies involving 1,008 patients, the side effects in
the control group given a harmless placebo were slightly higher than that of
hypericum 4.8 percent for the placebo group and 4.1 percent for hypericum. The
dropout rate of the placebo group was higher, too 1.8 percent for the placebo
group compared with 0.4 percent for hypericum.)

A higher figure was reported by the British Medical Journal in a review of six
hypericum studies. In these, 10.8 percent of the patients reported side effects
with hypericum (similar to the ones listed above), while 35.9 percent reported side
effects taking prescription antidepressants. Even at this higher rate, the
British Medical Journal concluded the side effects of hypericum were "rare and mild."

The British Medical Journal also calls for more studies on the long-term
potential side effects of hypericum, a recommendation we wholehearted endorse. We can,
however, consider facts that lie outside the strict standards of medical
reporting. For example, the extensive use of St. John's wort in 2,400 years of folk and
herbal medicine as well as the twenty-million people in Germany who have been
taking hypericum for more than a year and have not reported any long-term side
effects different or more prevalent than those of the shorter-term medical
studies.

Some of the most troublesome side effects of prescription antidepressants --
reduced sexual drive or dysfunction, adverse interaction with alcohol or other
drugs, dry mouth, and headache -- were not reported by patients taking
hypericum.

Further, hypericum's side effects went away soon after the patients stopped
taking it. There were no  "nonreversible" side effects; that is, no permanent harm was
done and all side effects were quickly reversed as soon as the patients no
longer took hypericum.