A Dose of Lead or Mercury With Your Medicine
Are we being pummeled with so many warnings about heavy metals in the food and water that we're starting to tune out? Not all of the media reports about a new study that found heavy metals such as lead and mercury in a sizable sample of traditional ayurvedic medicines of India have been as cautionary (a polite word for alarming) as I would have liked them to be. I'm not a physician or toxicologist or biochemist, but I've written about alternative medicine and read a few studies over the years, and the bottom line of this one, in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is about as subtle as a traffic cop's whistle.
Here it is: Out of 193 ayurvedic medicines purchased online—115 of them manufactured in the United States, 77 in India, and 1 in Canada—about 1 in 5 contained detectable amounts of lead, mercury, and arsenic. While some reporting has noted that the incidence was higher among U.S.-made products, the difference is trivial, 21.7 percent compared with 19.5 percent of medicines from India.
It is the amount of the stuff that should be making eyelids click wide open. In the medicines with measurable quantities of one or more of the three metals, the median amount was higher than that considered safe by at least one of several public-health standards. For products made in the United States, the median concentrations were too high but considerably lower for lead and mercury than the concentrations in India-made products.
What is scarier, however, is the range. Measured in micrograms of metal for every gram of product, the highest concentration of lead in a U.S. product was 20.5 micrograms—nothing to be proud of, but insignificant compared with a high of 25,950 mcg for an Indian product. Mercury contamination in U.S. products similarly topped out at 34.5 mcg against 28,500. The worst offenders by far were rasa shastra medicines, which purposely combine herbs with metals and minerals. Practitioners say the metals are "purified" and the products are safe and therapeutic if made and administered correctly. The results of the investigation suggest otherwise, and more than twice as many of the rasa shastra drugs in the study were contaminated as the other medicines.
Don't be reassured by a label pledging "good manufacturing practices," either; 75 percent of the contaminated products carried that claim. If such medicines are part of your regimen, check for membership in the American Herbal Products Association. Among the 46 products in the study from AHPA members, only three had detectable amounts of the metals.
Tags: India | medicine | product safety
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Reader Comments
This would be surprising if I hadn't heard of eugenics and population control
Your article seems to reinforce the idea that the medical industrial complex and the architects of society only want us to live longer if we are sick and unhealthy.
You could believe that this is just an accident and bad business practices. Or you can look at it from the standpoint of the oligarchs who are on record saying that the ideal population for the Earth is less than one billion people. Maybe they are right and maybe it's no accident.
Weren't a lot of people overreacting about the microwave a long time ago? Did any of those conspiracy warnings ever come to fruition?
Or maybe it's like in the first Batman movie with Jack Nicholson where it is not just one product or another that makes you sick but a combination of products. Fluoride in the water, Mercury in your vaccine, low pulse microwaves from the cell phone towers, Mercury in your tuna, heavy metals and your medicine.
Yet Another Nonsense! from Mainstream medical branch to scare people
Seems like this article has been targeted to scare people away from using alternate, effective and cheaper medicines.
So far there has not been even a single case of death or fatal report through out the world history from any herbal medicine.
The report says so far 80 cases has been reported in past 30 yrs for apparently not so lethal side effects, maximum is vomiting or feeling uneasiness in some cases. Chances are very high they might have used medicine not prescribed for them, kind of you taking anti-biotic not meant for you.
Chances are those people might have used expired medicines. If you use any of the expired mainstream medicine and you know what can happen to you, you can even easily die, and yet in case of Ayuervedic medicine the side effect is limited to feeling some uneasiness or vomiting at max.
Now the number of people who have died itself using the main stream medicine in past 30 years will come to hundred of thousands to couple of millions. Compare this to not even a single death reported.
Now the number of people who feel uneasiness or felt fever or had soar throat or vomited after eating mainstream medicine would be in billions! in past 30 years. I am 29 and I do not know a single person in life who would not have at least once some bad side effect from mainstream medicine.
Now, the reasons for lead or mercury can be the tools used to make them or the cheap containers and this doesn't mean the Ayurvedic medicine itself is bad.
This article is written only for one purpose to undermine the effectiveness of Ayuervda and scare people. This reminds me of Bush few years back saying "America is at war, Iraq is a terrorist nation and blah blah".
The government's story on vaccines
Good article. People indeed are, thanks to the net, awash in a sea of info about everything you can imagine and everything else. It tends to take away from the positive effect of even the clearest, best written articles, a phenomenon that really gets in the way. Here's an article on the mercury and other...unconventional ingredients in vaccines and what the government has to say about the mercury itself. Fellow readers might be surprised!
http://warofillusions.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/the-abbreviated/
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U.S. News's Avery Comarow has been editor of the America's Best Hospitals annual rankings since their debut in 1990. In his reporting on all aspects of clinical medicine from the latest cholesterol guidelines to robotic surgery, he has kept one question in the front of his mind: What does this mean to patients? That perspective uniquely qualifies him to observe and comment on the efforts by hospitals and other healthcare providers to improve care and patient safety.
