Translating Traditional Herbal Use into Medication-Safety Decisions: A Proposed Community-Contextualized Translational Ethnopharmacy Framework for Pharmacy Practice.
- 1Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, Zefat Academic College, Safed 1320611, Israel.
- 2Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, Ohio Northern University, Ada, OH 45810, USA.
Abstract
Traditional herbal preparations are frequently used alongside prescription and non-prescription medicines, yet conventional medication reconciliation may not preserve the preparation details needed to interpret interaction and safety evidence. We propose the community-contextualized translational ethnopharmacy framework (CTEF) as a testable conceptual architecture for pharmacy practice. Developed through a problem-oriented conceptual synthesis and a targeted, non-systematic comparator mapping, CTEF treats the exact reported preparation as the clinical exposure and embeds it within a review of the patient's complete medication and clinical context. The revised framework is iterative and comprises five functions: exposure characterization; comprehensive medication and clinical reconciliation; appraisal of the evidence profile and transferability to the reported preparation; consequence-sensitive action selection using patient vulnerability and explicit escalation/de-escalation rules; and culturally responsive communication, documentation, and follow-up. The central hypothesis is that, compared with a prespecified standard medication-reconciliation workflow, CTEF will improve exposure-characterization completeness, inter-rater reproducibility, and concordance with blinded external adjudication without unacceptable increases in consultation burden, unnecessary escalation, or patient-reported communication harm. CTEF is not a scale, treatment guideline, or validated clinical decision rule. Staged co-design, simulation, reliability, feasibility, comparative, and cross-cultural studies are required before clinical adoption.
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BibTeX
@article{dabour2026translating,
title = {{Translating Traditional Herbal Use into Medication-Safety Decisions: A Proposed Community-Contextualized Translational Ethnopharmacy Framework for Pharmacy Practice.}},
author = {Ziad Dabour and David H Kinder},
journal = {Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland)},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.3390/pharmacy14070141},
url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42931118},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Translating Traditional Herbal Use into Medication-Safety Decisions: A Proposed Community-Contextualized Translational Ethnopharmacy Framework for Pharmacy Practice.
AU - Ziad Dabour
AU - David H Kinder
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
JO - Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland)
DO - 10.3390/pharmacy14070141
UR - https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42931118
AB - Traditional herbal preparations are frequently used alongside prescription and non-prescription medicines, yet conventional medication reconciliation may not preserve the preparation details needed to interpret interaction and safety evidence. We propose the community-contextualized translational ethnopharmacy framework (CTEF) as a testable conceptual architecture for pharmacy practice. Developed through a problem-oriented conceptual synthesis and a targeted, non-systematic comparator mapping, CTEF treats the exact reported preparation as the clinical exposure and embeds it within a review of the patient's complete medication and clinical context. The revised framework is iterative and comprises five functions: exposure characterization; comprehensive medication and clinical reconciliation; appraisal of the evidence profile and transferability to the reported preparation; consequence-sensitive action selection using patient vulnerability and explicit escalation/de-escalation rules; and culturally responsive communication, documentation, and follow-up. The central hypothesis is that, compared with a prespecified standard medication-reconciliation workflow, CTEF will improve exposure-characterization completeness, inter-rater reproducibility, and concordance with blinded external adjudication without unacceptable increases in consultation burden, unnecessary escalation, or patient-reported communication harm. CTEF is not a scale, treatment guideline, or validated clinical decision rule. Staged co-design, simulation, reliability, feasibility, comparative, and cross-cultural studies are required before clinical adoption.
SN - 2226-4787
ER -