Therapeutic Potential of Herbalism for Opioid Use Disorder

Introduction: the opioid crisis continues to claim many lives, approximately one hundred thousand annually in the United States of America, motivating solutions. Currently, these focus on synthetic opioids and are helpful in some circumstances, but their adoption has not stymied opioid deaths. Possible solutions for opioid use disorder exist in substances known to herbal medicine, and these may be attractive treatment options.

Objective: this review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the integrative therapies available to current opioid users to help in the cessation, through decreasing withdrawal symptoms. We identified several herbal and nutraceutical therapies which require further investigation for their therapeutic potential in opioid use disorder.

Method: we performed a literature search using three databases: Google Scholar, China/Asia on Demand, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. A protocol was designed that incorporates the PRISMA guidelines, which was applied during the stages of searching and selecting articles.

Discussion and conclusions: several herbal and nutraceutical treatments, including Sophora alopecuroides, crocin, and Berberis vulgaris extracts, and Hab-o-shefa, Tai-Kang Ning, and Fu-Yuan Pellet formulations, demonstrate promise for the treatment of opioid use disorder, motivating their further study in larger scale trials. If the results from previous smaller trials hold, herbal medicines may function as effective therapeutics as part of an opiate cessation regimen.