Difficulties and Perspectives of Immunomodulatory Therapy with Mistletoe Lectins and Standardized Mistletoe Extracts in Evidence-Based Medicine

Table 1

Advantages and disadvantages of ME and purified (or synthetic) ML preparations for clinical use.

Plant ME	Purified or fragmented biologically active ML
Advantages
Easy to produce	Chemically well defined
Inexpensive	Biological effect is  reproducible
Now available in pharmacy	Dosage calculation is exact
More clinical experiences	Less possible side effect
	Easy to adapt to CAM  therapy
Disadvantages
Mixture of different	Expensive to produce
unknown molecules with
different biological activity
Biological effect is less	Not available in pharmacy
reproducible
Dosage calculation is difficult	Lack of clinical experiences
More possible side effects