They have a point. We have no easy way of verifying the ingredients, and thus no way of predicting the effect on a child or interactions with other medications:
One of the nation’s largest and oldest children’s hospitals is cracking down on parents who bring their kids herbs, extracts or other dietary supplements.
In what it describes as a break from other hospitals, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, or CHOP, last month removed most dietary supplements from its list of approved medicines, and established new policies for administering them.
Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at CHOP, tells The Salt the move comes after a “growing level of frustration” over the years. Offit, who chairs the board which approved the new policy, says supplements often aren’t what they claim to be. The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, treats them as food, not pharmaceuticals.
“The problem has been that we can’t even get from most companies that certificate of analysis, that shows the product was independently tested and what’s on the label is in the bottle,” Offit says, pointing to a recent problems like in Hawaii, where a fat-burning supplement was linked to liver failure.
Under CHOP’s old policy, dietary supplements were treated as home medications. If a family brought them in, an attending doctor or nurse was obliged to evaluate them as best they could and administer them along with hospital-sanctioned meds during the patient’s admission. If the supplements ran out, the provider would order more through the hospital pharmacy. Now, families are entirely responsible – they have to obtain and administer the unapproved supplements themselves, notify a doctor when that happens, and sign a waiver form. The hospital is also distributing additional explainers to families.
