Are you interested in herbal remedies and alternative medicine? The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health, publishes a series of fact sheets “that provide basic information about specific herbs or botanicals — common names, what the science says, potential side effects and cautions, and resources for more information.” These fact sheets are freely available as downloadable PDFs from the NCCAM website. As part of the library’s efforts to make online published government resources available to our patrons, these fact sheets will be findable through the library’s catalog.
The series title is Herbs at a Glance, and the first five fact sheets added to the catalog are about Fenugreek, Evening Primrose Oil, European Elder, European Mistletoe, and Ephedra. Eventually, all 47 fact sheets will be available through the library’s catalog, so check back often.
For those of you who can’t wait, the entire list of fact sheets is available at the NCCAM’s web site [nccam.nih.gov] where you can also download all of the fact sheets as a single e-book to read on your Kindle, Nook, iPad or other favorite e-reader.
Finally, for all you Harry Potter fans, yes, the European Elder is the tree from which the Elder Wand was made. 🙂
