Allergic reaction to herbs.

I had a serious allergic reaction last night. I'm currently taking herbal supplements for weight loss, they had been effective before and I lost 55 pounds by dieting and taking suppliments. I decided to lose about 25 pounds that I had put on in the past year, so I went back on them. I lost 12 pounds and then plateued, so the store gave me another supplement to break it.

I took the supplement 3x on Sunday and 3x on Monday. Monday morning I woke up with what I thought was a cold, by Monday eve., I had developed a rash and my eyes became very puffy. This morning when I woke up my face was swollen so bad, I didn't even recognize myself in the mirror. I literally had 3 rolls of skin under my eyes, my whole face was red, hot and tight and my right eye was swollen almost shut.

My hubby took me to the hospital, where they told me to stay away from all ingredients in this supplement, next time, it could be life-threatening. I got a steroid shot and anti-histamine pill and have to take claritan and zantac (I didn't know it was a histamine blocker) for 7 days.

I know it was probably a fluke, as the side effects are rare. The lady at the store felt really bad, she has only ever seen one allergy, not half as bad as mine. She gave me a free bottle of my other herbs and put a red flag on my chart.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was wondering if anyone knew of a site or list with side effects from herbal supplements. There is so much out there, but I can't seem to find something useful. There is tons of info on side efeects from drugs, and in my opinion, not enough on other things we put in our bodies.

The supplement's ingredients included: guarana, gugglipid extract, green tea extract (which I doubt had anything to do with it)

To give you an idea, I felt like Sloth from the Goonies. The ER doc looked like Tobey McGuire....and I looked like sloth. At least I wore my cute bra. Hubby wasn't amused. :o

That's my issue with herbal supplements- there isn't enough real research on them. They don't run trials like drug companies do, so it will be very hard to find a list of side-effects.

I would imagine though, just like people can be allergic to foods and plants, you can be allergic to stuff in supplements. I think it would be good to find out what exactly because if it turns out to be something regular (like tomatoes or nuts or something), you could be at risk just in regular eating....

I have the ingredients list, there are no food products in them, just the extracts in a gel cap.

The Doc figured it was gugglipid extract, I think it's some weird tree gum extract from India.

Guarana is an extract from a berry that is pretty much caffiene.

I've had green tea before, so I doubt it was that.

It's pretty scary, but i was fortunate that I could narrow it down to that being the only different thing I had contact with the past few days.