01.The effective and the dangerous
Some so-called “health supplements” could in fact be doing you harm. Which should you take and which should you avoid?
If a medication or health supplement is available to buy, it must be safe, right? Not necessarily. When our US sister organisation, Consumers Union, went shopping for supplements identified as the most dangerous, they found all of them readily available, either in-store or online. While some of these are not widely available for sale in Australia, others are, and there's still cause for concern.
The good news is that many of the most dangerous supplements are not widely available for sale in Australia. Colloidal silver, kava and bitter orange are the exceptions.
It's important to remember even products considered “safe” can be dangerous when taken in combination with certain medications or other herbal supplements, or if taken by people with certain conditions. Black cohosh, for example, is taken by millions of women worldwide for relief of menopause symptoms with no evident side effects, yet it has been implicated in cases of serious liver damage, albeit very few.
A bitter pill?
CHOICE is concerned that products considered unsafe are still being manufactured and sold here and overseas. While some have been banned or restricted (with labelling requirements, dosage specifications or import restrictions), some banned products have slipped through the net and others remain unrestricted. In Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is charged with making sure the complementary medicine products for sale are safe. The administration also maintains a list of relatively safe complementary medicines.
There are also plenty of complementary medicines that are probably safe but have no proven benefit. While they may not cause harm, consumers could be wasting their money and bypassing more effective treatment.
CHOICE wants a system introduced that allows a manufacturer to have the effectiveness of their product independently evaluated. If proven effective, a supplement would be awarded a Green Tick, similar to the Heart Foundation’s Red Tick.