RESEARCH ARTICLE Use of herbal medicinal p

ie wide. Nowadays, it still plays an important role in the cific provisions for herbal medicinal products within the Du et al. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2014, 14:218 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/14/218ample, extraction of plant parts such as roots and leaves.General-Pape-Str. 62-66, Berlin 12101, Germany Full list of author information is available at the end of the articlehealth care of numerous divergent societies ranging from developing countries in Asia and Africa to western developed nations [1]. In countries with highly devel-oped health care systems, herbal medicine is often European and German legal framework dealing with health care reflect its recognized significance. In this context, herbal medicinal products are defined as medi-cinal products containing exclusively herbal active substances [5,6]. These differ from chemically defined sub-stances in several aspects; most notably, they consist of complex multi-component mixtures resulting from, for ex- * Correspondence: DuY@rki.de1Department of Epidemiology and Health Monitoring, Robert Koch Institute,and prevention of diseases has a long tradition world-Background: Germany is a country with a high use of herbal medicinal products. Population-based data on th