Liang Dengting Yang Jie
Licorice is a very common Chinese medicine, which has the effect of tonifying the spleen and qi, relieving pain, expectorant and cough, clearing heat and detoxification and reconciling the potency of certain drugs. At the same time, licorice is also one of the most frequently used Chinese herbal medicines, according to statistics, among the more than 700 kinds of medicinal materials commonly used in Clinical Practice in China today, the prescription rate of licorice is more than 70%. In addition to medicine, many people in the folk for the purpose of health, with licorice soaked in water to drink, but long-term, large-scale use of licorice, not only can not maintain health, but also may cause limb edema.
Through the laboratory analysis of licorice components, it is found that licorice extract has the effect of mineralocorticoids, which can cause symptoms of pseudoaldosterone increase such as water and sodium retention, lowering blood potassium levels, and can also cause rhabdomyolysis. Therefore, long-term large-scale use of licorice preparations can appear fatigue, muscle strength decline, muscle pain, decreased urine output, limb edema, increased blood pressure and other manifestations.
If there is a history of long-term use of licorice preparations, the body has developed edema again, and the cause needs to be identified. First of all, seek medical treatment to rule out whether you have other organ diseases, such as nephritis, chronic heart failure, etc. After excluding organ diseases, check whether the oral medicine or tea you have been taking for a long time contains licorice preparations, and if so, it is recommended to stop the drug or tea for one week. In general, the edema caused by licorice preparations disappears after one week of discontinuation.
In short, licorice has a variety of pharmacological effects, not only traditional Chinese medicine attaches importance to it, Western medicine also found that it has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, detoxification, antihistamine, antibacterial, liver protection and other effects, young children, the elderly need to strengthen monitoring during the application of licorice to ensure reasonable application.
(Author: Nephrologist, Beijing Jishuitan Hospital)
【Source: Beijing Daily】
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