Channing J. Paller, MD, on communicating about natural products with patients with prostate cancer

In this video, Channing J. Paller, MD, discusses how health care professionals can best communicate the potential benefits and risks of natural products for prostate cancer to both patients and fellow health care professionals. She is the senior author of the recent Urologic Oncology paper, “Harnessing nature's therapeutic potential: A review of natural products in prostate cancer management.” Paller is an associate professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, director of Prostate Cancer Clinical Research, and associate director of oncology, Johns Hopkins Clinical Research Network, Baltimore, Maryland.

Transcription:

How can health care professionals best communicate the potential benefits and risks of natural products for prostate cancer to both patients and fellow health care professionals?

Health care professionals should take an evidence-based, transparent, patient-centered approach when communicating the risks of natural products with patients, just like any other drug. There can be natural product-drug interactions, drug-drug interactions, and we should pay attention. It's well known that grapefruit juice interacts with many drugs, but that took time to promote. Biotin interacts with many drugs.We need to use search engines that can provide education to the patient and the providers to make sure that we are educating the patient and ourselves about potential drug-natural product interactions, side effects, the variability of the product quality; all of those things should be carefully explained to the patient to make sure they don't run into trouble. But we need to promote further research and guidelines for safe use of these natural products, because I think we're missing out if we don't monitor them.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.