Dietary supplements send thousands to ER each year
By Mary Brophy Marcus, CBS News
Bad reactions to dietary supplements are sending tens of thousands of Americans to the ER every year, a study shows.
More than 23,000 visits to emergency rooms occur annually due to complications from taking dietary supplements such as herbal or complementary nutritional products, vitamins, and minerals, according to scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who coauthored the study. About 2,154 of the visits resulted in hospitalizations, the scientists reported.
The research, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, used surveillance data collected from 63 emergency departments across the country between 2004 and 2013.