Abstract
This article explores the need to perform pharmacoeconomic evaluations of herbal medicines and assesses the extent to which this approach has been applied so far to these products. There seems to be no compelling need for pharmacoeconomic analyses of herbal over-the-counter medicines, but such analyses are certainly warranted for herbal prescription medicines that have a high level of reimbursement. Such preparations are used in Germany, in particular, where physicians prescribed ginkgo, hawthorn, St John’s wort, horse-chestnut and saw palmetto to a value of more than DM50 million each in 1996.
In our survey, only a single pharmacoeconomic study, of uncertain quality, was found on these 5 herbs, whereas several pharmacoeconomic reports on synthetic competitors were retrieved. The time has come to submit highly reimbursed herbal prescription medicines to the same rigorous pharmacoeconomic evaluations as their synthetic competitors. At present, such studies are particularly important for Germany, but in the future they may also become relevant for other countries, inside as well as outside Europe.
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Notes
According to a follow-up survey on the use of alternative medicine in the US in 1997, the percentage of respondents who had used a herbal medicine in the past 12 months had increased to asmuch as 12%, and 15%of these users had seen an alternative medicine practitioner.[8]
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De Smet, P.A.G.M., Bonsel, G., Van der Kuy, A. et al. Introduction to the Pharmacoeconomics of Herbal Medicines. Pharmacoeconomics 18, 1–7 (2000). https://doi.org/10.2165/00019053-200018010-00001
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2165/00019053-200018010-00001