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Contraceptive pill and St John's Wort
Having taken both St John’s Wort and the contraceptive pill for some time, I was concerned to read that the two should not be taken together. Why is this and can you suggest an alternative which I can take alongside the pill to improve mood?
St John’s Wort has had something of an undeserved bad press this year - which is a shame because I cannot think of a more effective natural remedy for alleviating mild to moderate depression.
In Germany, for example, where 80% of GPs regularly prescribe herbal remedies, St John’s Wort outsells Prozac by 20:1 and I have just returned from New York where an eminent professor of psychiatry at one of the major teaching hospitals presented the results of a large-scale clinical trial which showed St John’s Wort was just as effective as any conventional antidepressant.
It is important to remember herbs can be just as powerful as prescription drugs - this is why, of course, they work. If they had no effect at all in the body, then you would not need to worry about how they might interfere with existing medication but they do and so it makes sense to be careful. That said, let me tell you where the scare stories that linked St John’s Wort and the pill came from.
The theory is that the herb reduces the effectiveness of the pill by accelerating its breakdown by the body. There have not been any clinical studies to investigate this - so until someone does the research, we cannot know if this is true.
What prompted this concern was a report from a Swedish manufacturer of the herb which admitted that a handful of women, (just eight to be precise) all aged between 23 and 31, and all taking the pill, had contacted the company to say they had suffered from bleeding between their periods when they had taken St John’s Wort for depression. When they stopped taking the herb, the bleeding stopped too.
*Anyone who is already taking anticoagulant drugs for heart problems or a prescription antidepressant should consult their doctor before taking St John’s Wort.