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Abstract

Hawthorn is a small thorny tree with white flowers and red berries that grows in temperature zones. Extracts from the plant were used centuries ago by the Greek physician Dioscorides, are widely prescribed in modern-day Germany for angina and congestive heart failure, and are now emerging as sought-after treatment for high blood pressure in America. Hawthorn (Crataegus), while not as well known as garlic, is just one of dozens of herbs that patients seek or are already taking "on the side." According to a recent survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the number of Americans using alternative medical therapies continues its steady rise, reaching more than 42% in 1997 [1]. It is not surprising that almost two thirds of doctors recommend alternative therapies to their patients at least once. But the subset of doctors who report using alternative therapies themselves reaches a remarkable 50% [2].Economics are further proof. Americans spent more than $21 billion on these therapies in 1997, exceeding out-of-pocket spending for all hospitalizations. Hypertension is a common diagnosis for which nontraditional remedies are requested.The reality is thus an overlap between alternative and traditional medicine, a widespread coexistence that makes exposure to herbs a regular occurrence in clinical practice. The sites below are intended to point healthcare providers in the best direction when searching for reliable online information on herbal medicine. A focus on hawthorn through these sites illustrates the search.In 1998, Congress established the NCCAM at the National Institutes of Health. The NCCAM is an "advocate for quality science, rigorous and relevant research, and open and objective inquiry into which CAM practices work, which do not, and why. Its overriding mission is to give the American public reliable information about the safety and effectiveness of CAM practices." Before that time, the NCCAM was the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), established in 1992. Its expansion increased the center's ability to initiate and fund additional research projects and to provide more information to the public.Click on the "For consumers and practitioners" tab, and then on "Complementary and alternative medicine databases." Once inside the citation index, which consists of more than 175,000 bibliographic entries, you can perform a single term or Boolean search in seconds. Thirty-four records were revealed by searching "hawthorn," with titles like "Comparisons of pharmacological effect and LD50 among four kinds of Hawthorn fruit;" and "Some structural characteristics of hawthorn glycoflavonoids." Most were in foreign languages, however, and little was available in terms of abstracts. HerbMEd www.herbmed.orgThis interactive, electronic herbal database provides hyperlinked access to scientific data underlying the use of herbs for health. HerbMEd is a free service provided by the Alternative Medicine Foundation, Inc. Click on "Crataegus" to find six categories of information: evidence for activ...