Medical Disclaimer

In an emergency, stop reading and get help

If you think you are having a medical emergency, call your local emergency number now. In the United States and Canada that is 911. In the United Kingdom it is 999 or 111 for urgent non-emergency advice. Across the European Union it is 112.

If you have taken something and believe you have been poisoned or have had a serious reaction, contact your local poison control service immediately. In the United States, Poison Control is 1-800-222-1222.

Do not use Herb Alert to work out whether a situation is an emergency. It cannot tell you. Call for help first.

[to be supplied: the countries and regions Herb Alert is actually offered in, so that the emergency and poison-control numbers listed here cover them. A reader in a country not represented above must not be left without a number.]

Information only - not medical advice

Everything in Herb Alert - the summaries, the evidence-strength ratings, the safety notes, the interaction warnings, the community experiences - is general information about what published research has reported.

It is not advice about you. It is not a diagnosis, a treatment plan, a prescription, or a recommendation to take, stop, or change the dose of anything.

Herb Alert does not know your medical history, your other conditions, the medicines you take, your allergies, your age, your weight, whether you are pregnant, or how your liver and kidneys are working. Every one of those can change whether a substance is safe for you. A clinician can weigh them. This app cannot.

No clinician-patient relationship

Using Herb Alert does not create a clinician-patient, doctor-patient, pharmacist-patient or any other professional relationship between you and Herb Alert, its operator, or anyone who has contributed to it.

Nobody at Herb Alert is acting as your healthcare provider, and nobody here is reviewing your situation.

Catalog entries are produced automatically and their evidence ratings are automated by default. Herb Alert can record that a particular rating was reviewed by a named, qualified assessor, and a rating is only ever described as a formal assessment when such a reviewer is recorded against it; any rating without one is marked automated and is never presented as a formal appraisal. Treat an automated rating as a machine's reading of the literature, because that is what it is.

[to be supplied: whether a licensed clinician actually reviews any catalog content in practice, and if so their name or credentials and the scope of that review. The product is built to record a named qualified assessor against a rating, but the codebase cannot say whether anyone is engaged to be one. If nobody is, this section must say so plainly.]

Talk to a qualified professional first

Before you start, stop or change any herb, supplement, natural remedy or medicine, talk to a qualified healthcare professional - a doctor, a pharmacist, or another licensed clinician - who can consider your particular circumstances.

Your pharmacist is often the fastest route to an interaction check, and asking costs nothing.

Take a full list of everything you take with you: prescription medicines, over-the-counter medicines, herbs, supplements and vitamins. Interactions come from the whole list, not from one item at a time.

Do not delay or disregard medical advice

Never disregard professional medical advice, and never delay seeking it, because of something you read in Herb Alert.

Do not stop a prescribed medicine, or change how much of it you take, because of anything in this catalog. Stopping some medicines abruptly is dangerous in itself. Talk to the person who prescribed it.

If you have symptoms that are new, severe, worsening or persistent, see a clinician. Researching them here instead is not a substitute for being examined.

Choosing a natural remedy over an effective treatment can cause serious harm, including harm that cannot be undone. "Natural" does not mean safe, mild, or without side effects. Many of the most toxic substances known are natural.

Herb-drug interactions are real and can be serious

Herbs and supplements are biologically active. They can interact with prescription and over-the-counter medicines - making a medicine weaker, making it stronger, or producing an effect neither would produce alone. Some of these interactions are dangerous.

They can also interact with each other, with alcohol, with food, and with your existing conditions. Some affect bleeding, blood pressure, blood sugar, sedation, heart rhythm, or how the liver clears other drugs.

Herb Alert lists the interactions and cautions it knows about. That list is not complete and must never be treated as an all-clear.

The absence of a warning in Herb Alert does not mean a substance is safe, does not mean it is safe for you, and does not mean it will not interact with what you already take. It may only mean that nobody has studied the combination, or that the study exists and is not yet in this catalog.

A pharmacist or prescriber with your full medication list is the right person to check an interaction. Please ask them.

The catalog is incomplete, and evidence changes

Herb Alert summarises published research. Published research is itself incomplete, sometimes contradictory, often based on small studies, and frequently conducted on preparations, doses or populations that are not yours.

Studies are regularly superseded. Something reported as promising can later fail to replicate. An entry you read today may say something different next month.

Summaries can be wrong. A summary can misstate a finding, omit a caveat, or lag behind a retraction or safety alert. Where a decision matters, read the cited source, and treat the citation as the authority rather than our summary of it.

We do not guarantee that the catalog is complete, accurate or current, and we do not guarantee that any particular substance, condition, interaction or safety signal appears in it at all.

What the evidence-strength rating means

The evidence-strength rating describes the quality and quantity of published research behind a claim. It is a description of the literature, and nothing else.

It is not a safety score, not an effectiveness score, and not a recommendation. A substance can have strong evidence and still be wrong or dangerous for you. A substance can have weak evidence simply because it has not been studied much.

A high rating never means "safe to take". A low rating never means "proven not to work".

There are five levels, and this is what each one means. High: the published research is consistent and directly relevant, and further study is unlikely to change the picture much. Moderate: the research points one way, but further study could change the picture. Low: the research is limited, inconsistent, or only indirectly about the question, so the picture may well change. Very low: there is very little to go on, and any impression it gives should be treated as provisional. Not assessed: the certainty of the research has not been appraised at all - which is not the same as low certainty, and is not a finding about the substance.

The framework behind those labels is informed by GRADE, the standard approach used in evidence reviews, which downgrades certainty for risk of bias, inconsistency, indirectness, imprecision and publication bias. Herb Alert applies those five considerations, but an automated label is not a formal GRADE assessment and this product will not call it one. A formal assessment requires a stated methodology and a named qualified assessor; a rating with neither is shown as automated.

Products, dosage and quality are outside our control

Herb Alert does not manufacture, test, sell, supply or endorse any product.

Herbal and supplement products vary enormously in what they actually contain. Strength, purity, plant part, extract type and preparation method all differ between products with the same name on the label, and products have been found to be contaminated, adulterated or mislabelled.

In many countries these products are regulated as foods or supplements rather than as medicines, which means they are not required to be proven effective, and are not held to the manufacturing and testing standards that apply to prescription drugs. That is a regulatory fact about the category, not a criticism of any particular product.

Any dose mentioned in the catalog is a dose reported in the research described. It is not a dose recommendation for you, and it may not correspond to the product in front of you.

[to be supplied: a jurisdiction-appropriate regulatory statement. In the United States the FDA requires the statement that these products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease and that claims have not been evaluated by the FDA. Other markets - the UK, EU, Canada, Australia - impose their own wording. Counsel should specify which statements are required where the app is offered, since making a health claim in the wrong form is itself a regulatory breach.]

Some people need to be especially careful

Talk to a clinician before taking any herb or supplement if any of the following applies to you. This list is not exhaustive.

• You are pregnant, trying to become pregnant, or breastfeeding. Many herbs are unsafe or untested in pregnancy.
• The remedy is intended for an infant or a child. Herb Alert is not designed for paediatric use.
• You take prescription medicine of any kind, and particularly blood thinners, sedatives, antidepressants, immunosuppressants, chemotherapy, transplant medicines, diabetes medicines, heart or blood pressure medicines, or hormonal contraception.
• You have liver or kidney disease, or any condition affecting how your body clears substances.
• You have surgery or a medical or dental procedure coming up. Several common herbs affect bleeding, blood pressure or anaesthesia, and are usually stopped in advance.
• You have a bleeding disorder, a seizure disorder, a hormone-sensitive condition, an autoimmune condition, or a psychiatric condition.
• You are older, are frail, or take several medicines at once.
• You have allergies, especially to plants, pollens or foods related to what you are considering.

Community experiences are not evidence

Where Herb Alert shows experiences written by other people, those are personal accounts of what one individual says happened to them. They are not verified, they are not research, and they are not medical advice.

One person's experience does not predict yours. Do not use it to decide what to take.

Anything you write about your own experience is likewise your own account. Do not present it as advice to anyone else.

No endorsement

The presence of a substance in the catalog is not an endorsement of it. Herb Alert catalogs what has been studied, including substances that were studied and found not to work, and substances that carry real risk.

Herb Alert does not recommend any brand, retailer, practitioner or clinic.

If something goes wrong

If you have a bad reaction to a herb or supplement, stop taking it and contact a healthcare professional. If the reaction is severe, treat it as an emergency and use the numbers at the top of this page.

Consider reporting the reaction to your national regulator, so that others benefit from it. In the United States that is the FDA's MedWatch programme; in the United Kingdom it is the MHRA's Yellow Card scheme.

Herb Alert is not an adverse-event reporting route and must not be used as one. If you record adverse effects in an experience report, that text stays in your own account and, if you choose to publish, may appear in the de-identified community entry. It is not forwarded to any regulator, manufacturer or health authority, and nobody is monitoring it for safety signals on your behalf. Reporting a reaction to your national regulator is a separate act that only you can take.

[to be supplied: the adverse-event reporting routes for every region the app is offered in, so that a reader outside the US and UK is given one. Also a deliberate decision on whether Herb Alert should ever accept adverse-event reports itself; it does not today, and taking them on may attach pharmacovigilance obligations, so this should not be offered casually.]

Your responsibility

You are responsible for what you decide to take. By using Herb Alert you accept that you use its information at your own risk, and that decisions about your health should be made with a qualified clinician rather than with an app.

This disclaimer forms part of the Herb Alert Terms of Service and should be read with them.

Questions

Questions about this disclaimer, or about something you have read in the catalog, can be sent to support@herbalert.net.

We cannot answer personal medical questions, and we will not try to. Please ask a clinician.