Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
Institute of Brain Medicine, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
World J Biol Psychiatry. 2019 Oct;20(8):586-604. doi: 10.1080/15622975.2017.1346279. Epub 2017 Jul 11.
Herbs are frequently and concurrently used with prescribed drugs by patients worldwide. While clinical trials have found some herbs to be as useful as standard psychiatric drugs, most clinicians are unaware of their pharmacological mechanisms. We searched English language and other language literature with English abstracts listed in PubMed website, supplemented by additional through Google Scholar's free academic paper abstract website for publications on herbs, focussing on their clinical use in mental disorders, their neurobiology and their pharmacology. A major reason for herbs remaining outside of mainstream psychiatry is that the terminology and concepts in herbal medicine are not familiar to psychiatrists in general. Many publications regarding the use of herbal medicine for psychiatric disorders are deficient in details regarding diagnosis, criteria for response and the neurobiology details compared with publications on standard psychotropic drugs. Nomenclature for herbal medicine is usually confusing and is not conducive to an easy understanding of their mode of action in psychiatric disorders. The recent neuroscience-based nomenclature (NbN) for psychotropics methodology would be a logical application to herbal medicine in facilitating a better understanding of the use of herbal medicine in psychiatry.
草药在全球范围内经常被患者与处方药同时使用。虽然临床试验发现一些草药与标准精神药物一样有用，但大多数临床医生并不了解它们的药理机制。我们在 PubMed 网站上搜索了英文和其他语言的文献，并用 Google Scholar 的免费学术论文摘要网站进行了补充，这些文献主要关注草药在精神障碍中的临床应用、它们的神经生物学和药理学。草药仍然没有被纳入主流精神病学的一个主要原因是，一般来说，精神病学家不熟悉草药医学中的术语和概念。许多关于草药治疗精神障碍的出版物在诊断、反应标准和神经生物学细节方面都缺乏细节，与关于标准精神药物的出版物相比。草药的命名法通常令人困惑，不利于人们轻松理解它们在精神障碍中的作用模式。最近基于神经科学的精神药物命名法（NbN）方法将是一种在精神病学中应用草药的合理方法，有助于更好地理解草药在精神病学中的应用。
