Elderly Patient Suffers Severe Bleeding After Mixing Herb With Warfarin

A common practice with a hidden risk

The case was encountered by Dr Raymond Wong Siu-ming when he was a consultant at the Prince of Wales Hospital’s Poison Treatment Centre and a lead expert with the Integrated Chinese-Western Medicine Treatment Safety Centre.

The patient had a mechanical heart valve and was taking warfarin, a blood thinner used to prevent and treat blood clots.

After she started using danshen, her blood lost its ability to clot normally.

Dr Wong’s case illustrates what the Health Matters series describes as an increasingly common blind spot: Chinese medicine and Western prescription drugs are often used together, but patients may not always understand the effect of the combination.

Why “natural” is not the only question

For many Hongkongers, Chinese medicine is part of everyday life rather than simply an alternative to Western care.

That everyday use can include chrysanthemum tea, tonic soup, cupping, or a proprietary pill bought from a pharmacy.

The key distinction is not only whether a product is seen as “natural”.

The more important question is whether it is being used as food, as symptom relief, or as a concentrated treatment taken alongside medicines that already have powerful effects.

What the danshen case shows

The danshen and warfarin case shows why patients combining Chinese remedies with Western prescriptions can face avoidable complications.

It also shows why the impact of combining Chinese medicine with prescription drugs should not be assumed to be harmless simply because a remedy is familiar or commonly used.

In the second instalment of the four-part Health Matters series on traditional Chinese medicine, Aidyn Fitzpatrick examines these drug-interaction risks and how Hongkongers can protect themselves from avoidable complications.

Source: South China Morning Post