Comarow On Quality
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A Dose of Lead or Mercury With Your Medicine
Continue reading… 5 CommentsAre 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.
U.S. News's Avery Comarow has been editor of the America's Best Hospitals annual rankings since they first appeared in 1990. His reporting on clinical medicine, from the latest cholesterol guidelines to robotic surgery, has been driven by the question: What does this mean to patients? And that is the perspective he brings to his observations and commentaries on the increasing number of programs by hospitals and other healthcare providers to improve care and patient safety.
