What Your Grandmother Told You…Still Holds True
Last year the National Institute of Health published a study that said echinacea, or purple coneflower (at right - isn’t she pretty?), does nothing to help or cure the common cold. (Hundreds of years of pioneer and native American experience to the contrary). Now, the British Journal Lancet has published a counter study that says granny was right. From USA Today Health:
A new study published today in the British journal The Lancet: Infectious Diseases finds that the popular herbal supplement echinacea cuts the chance of catching a cold by 58% and can reduce the duration of colds by about a day and a half.This directly contradicts a major study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine which found that echinacea doesn’t work.
The Lancet study looked at the results of 14 previous clinical trials that investigated echinacea’s effects on the common cold. Those trials involved a total of over 1,600 patients.
The analysis was done by Craig Coleman, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Connecticut, and colleagues. Meta-analyses combine the findings of large numbers of studies to tease out trends that might not be visible individually.
Coleman and his colleagues looked at all the randomized, placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed studies available and by combining their data, found that echinacea reduced the incidence of contracting the common cold and its duration.
And they wonder why the herb grannies sometimes cast a jaundiced eye at ‘that newfangled doctorin". While science has its place, you’ve got to wonder sometimes why hundreds of years of anecdotal evidence is often pooh-poohed. Perhaps because big pharma can’t lay patent to what is essentially a weed? Full article here
.jpg)
July 9th, 2007 04:07
As I see it, there is a very good reason to see hundreds of years of anecdotal evidence as nothing more than an inspiration for what to check out: It has much of the time - probably most of the time - been wrong.
It is definitively a good idea to check these things out; it’s a bad idea to take the anecdotes as proof, as they’re so often bogus.
July 10th, 2007 10:55
Hi Eivind,
Thanks for commenting. You say "most of the time" anecdotal reports are wrong - would you have studies on that for us to check out? I haven’t seen any that say this…but I have seen increasing studies by clinics such as Mayo and Meninger on the effectiveness of things as diverse as herbal medicine and shamanic drumming.
Though you’re right, just because someone says something is so is no reason not to check it out. Some of these things work, some of them don’t, for sure. Sometimes folks back-when were just using what they had at hand that worked most of the time and passed that knowledge on because it was better than nothing at all. But to throw out years of ‘what works’ because the scientific studies haven’t been done yet is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Echinacea in particular has hundreds of years of proven safety and effectiveness in the Native American community.
We need to be mindful of what we dismiss and our addiction to the advanced knowledge of modern science. (which isn’t often as advanced as it thinks it is) Simply because a workable tool is native knowledge or anecdotally corroborated does not mean it is untested. And scientific inquiry isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either - statistics can (and have) been manipulated and made to tell the story drug manufacturers, research houses and hospitals want them to as well. And as I said above, big pharma is not friendly to cures which grow in the ground - and hence, which it cannot lay patent to.
Caveat lector.
Warmly,
Maryam