Oral herbal medicines for psoriasis: A review of clinical studies

Various forms of complementary and alternative medicine are used in psoriasis. Among these, herbal medicines are frequently used as systemic and/or topical interventions either as a replacement for or in conjunction with conventional methods. The benefit of such use is unclear. This review is to provide an up-to-date review and discussion of the clinical evidence for the main kinds of herbal therapies for psoriasis. Searches of the biomedical databases PubMed (including MEDLINE), EMBASE and CINAHL were conducted in December 2011 which identified 32 clinical studies, all published in English. Twenty of these primarily tested topical herbal medicines and were thus excluded.