Limitations
The main limitation in this study was related to determining scientific
names of herbal medicines because some of the herbal medicines with one
common name have several scientific names which are different in
therapeutic properties. For this issue, the herbalists selected the
prevalent species of herbal medicines in our country (Iran). The other
limitation was underestimation of herbal medicines which patients used.
Because they used some herbal medicines but did not remember the name of
them due to recall bias. The other limitation of this study is related
to the design of the study. As this was a cross-sectional study, we
could not confirm the causation of the predictor variables with the
potential herb-drug interaction as the outcome.