Echinacea proven useless, again.
Posted by matt Wed, 03 Aug 2005 18:25:10 GMT
This NY Times article talks about a study that once again, and in new ways, refutes any claims to a cold remedy.
Some cool quotes.
The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved 437 people who volunteered to have cold viruses dripped into their noses. Some swallowed echinacea for a week beforehand, others a placebo. Still others took echinacea or a placebo at the time they were infected. Then the subjects were secluded in hotel rooms for five days while scientists examined them for symptoms and took nasal washings to look for the virus and for an immune system protein, interleukin-8. Some had hypothesized that interleukin-8 was stimulated by echinacea, enabling the herb to stop colds. But the investigators found that those who took echinacea fared no differently from those who took a placebo: they were just as likely to catch a cold, their symptoms were just as severe, they had just as much virus in their nasal secretions, and they made no more interleukin-8.
Now, with increasing evidence that echinacea does not work for colds, scientists are confronting a problem, Dr. Sampson said, in that "there is no 'demarcation of the absurd,' a point at which it is unwise to pursue an investigation further." For Dr. Turner, that point is here. "We should assume that echinacea does not work until somebody proves it does," he said. That, he added, "is the flip side of where we've been."
