Do Ayurvedic medicines cure or cause harm? That鈥檚 the question raised by a study showing that 21 per cent of 193 traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicines bought on the internet from US or Indian sources contained high amounts of lead, mercury or arsenic.
One sample of a preparation called Ekangvir Ras had 26,000 parts per million of lead. This compares with a US legal limit of 2 ppm in pharmaceutically produced calcium tablets for the elderly.
In a subset of preparations called Rasa Shastra medicines, minerals with heavy metals are deliberately added. 鈥淎yurvedic practitioners think that if these are mixed properly, they are non-toxic, but that conflicts head-on with conventional scientific thinking,鈥� says Robert Saper of Boston University School of Medicine (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 300, p 915).
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Saper wants regulators to limit the heavy metals in all food supplements.
