A 16 years old girl from London was diagnosed with acute hepatitis after she told doctors that she started drinking green tea she bought online in order to lose weight.
A new case was published in the British Medical Journal Case reports this Friday. It tells the story of an unidentified patient that visited her London doctors because of her severe abdominal pains, joint pain and nausea symptoms. Physicians, who thought she might have a minor infection, prescribed her antibiotics and sent her home. However, the patient came back to the emergency room presenting even worse symptoms.
The patient told the doctors that thanks to the green tea she had bought online she had lost a couple of pounds but suddenly the severe abdominal pains, dizziness and nausea kicked in. The patient was scared when she was hospitalized and underwent a lot of tests, she later said that she did not understand what was going on with her.
The London doctors checked the patient for multiple viral infections that may had caused her illness, and concluded that she had hepatitis (inflammation of the liver). The girl had stopped drinking the tea and she was given medication and IV therapy (intravenous liquids). Luckily for her, she recovered quickly.
Though researchers have not tested the tea to see what may have caused the reaction, they believe the tea itself could have been the culprit in this situation. The doctors declared that tea is not always healthy and safe to drink, even if contains many antioxidants. They explained that numerous additives may cause harm to certain people. There is always the possibility that tea from the market could contain substances that may cause chemical driven liver damage.
Researchers said that these situations are not as exclusive as we may think, and they are particularly frequent with weight loss preparations. Other chemical substances that may have been present in tea are pesticides.
Doctors are concerned about the idea of people buying unknown herbal supplements over the Internet with little to no background check on where it came from. They warned that just because a product is natural it does not mean that it cannot hurt you. Some herbs can have large amounts of toxicity.
The liver is usually the first organ to sense toxicity, because its role is to filter them out of the body. Cases of hepatitis from such substances are most prevalent with bodybuilding and weight loss products.
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