HEMORRHOIDS: NEW INSIGHTS INTO SURGICAL AND NON-SURGICAL TREATMENTS WITH EMPHASIS ON MEDICINAL HERBS

Hemorrhoid is well-known as one of the most common diseases which can significantly affects the quality of life patients. Since pharmacologic agents usually do not respond well and surgical approaches are associated with some complications; therefore, physicians have paid attention to safer therapies such as diet therapy, hydrotherapy and herbal medicines. The present article aimed to review the surgical and non-surgical treatments with emphasis on medicinal herbs. In this review, we used a number of databases such as Web of Science, PubMed, Google scholar EMBASE, Scopus and directory of open access journals (DOAJ) to recognize all published articles on the subject. Our search was carried out without date limitation based on the combinations of some key words and or their equivalents; “hemorrhoid”, “herbal medicines”, “plant medicines”, and “traditional medicine”. The obtained results of our review demonstrated that 105 medicinal herbs were found which have been traditionally used to treat hemorrhoids around the world. The most parts of these plants are leaves, fruit, root and seed, respectively, whereas these medicinal herbs are most commonly used in the Asian and African countries such as Iran, Pakistan, India, South Africa, etc. The present study demonstrated there are several approaches through surgical and non-surgical methods; however, various unwanted complications such as bleeding, surgery cost, long hospitalization, perforation of rectum, retro peritoneal and pelvic sepsis as well as recurrence of symptoms may occur in patients following the surgical and non-surgical treatments. On the other hand, herbal medicines, due to some properties such as wound healing, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-edema and hepatoprotective, they can efficiently be used for treatment of hemorrhoids.