Milk Thistle may not help our Liver

[raggedyann1]

Hi all,

I was reading this article yesterday and thought I would share it with everyone.

http://www.webmd.com/content/article/116/112282.htm

Karen

[Vida]

hi karen

style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/Thanx.gif you for posting about milk thistle - i have an auto immune diesease which affects the liver and had been thinking of taking milk thistle and my my g.p. thought it would be ok - i probably won't bother now if there is now proven improvement it would be a waste of my precous cash style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ermm.gif

style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/flowers.gif style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/flowers.gif

[Erskine]

not a bad study, but also not relevant to most claims i'm read about milk thistle. the active ingredient is silybin, a component of silymarin. also, the study was done on people who already had liver damage. here's my personal story: i was hospitalized for several month with pulmonary effusion, sle based. i was on 80mg iv pred, methaltrexate, and 50mg demerol every 4hrs, and nothing was getting better. liver toxicity started to set in, so they needed to reduce my meds, the only thing keeping my lungs working at all. enter silymarin. i took high doses (1000mg) orally, along with 2000mg coq10 every four hours. as my blood was being drawn every four hours, we saw an immediate drop in liver enzyme numbers, and my meds were upped again. this went on for several weeks, and i've got the blood work to prove it.

moral of that story is, silymarin didn't cure me, but it did allow my body to process a lot more meds and that stabalized me till they found something less toxic. abstracts aren't just about the results of a study, but the parameters they used to draw their conclusions. hope this helps.