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A 57-year-old woman spent six days in the hospital for severe liver damage after taking daily megadoses of the popular herbal supplement, turmeric, which she had seen touted on social media, according to NBC News.
The woman, Katie Mohan, told the outlet that she had seen a doctor on Instagram suggesting it was useful against inflammation and joint pain. So, she began taking turmeric capsules at a dose of 2,250 mg per day. According to the World Health Organization, an acceptable daily dose is up to 3 mg per kilogram of weight per day—for a 150-pound (68 kg) adult, that would be about 204 mg per day. Mohan was taking more than 10 times that amount.
The Instagram Doctor didn’t bother to read the Wikipedia article on tumeric. I did yesterday because my mom has been taking it and heard about this.
It’s not an anti-inflammatory and is a mild allergen. Some folks have immune systems that don’t like it in other words. And liver failure is what happens to those folks when they take to many tumeric supplements.