Hot and Colds
Hot and Colds
Q: What’s worse than suffering the discomfort and congestion of a common cold?
A: A flawed study that encourages you to avoid an herbal remedy that reduces the duration of the common cold.
Getting all prestigious with it
About two years ago, in the e-Alert “Get to the Root” (8/11/05), I told you about a study that found the herb echinacea to be ineffective in preventing or treating the common cold. The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and you’ve probably noticed that nearly every mainstream report that mentions NEJM leads off by calling it “the prestigious” New England Journal of Medicine.
Unfortunately, all that prestige helped convince consumers that the study was sound and echinacea was ineffective. Sales of echinacea quickly dropped off after its publication.
Of course, the mainstream media ignored the most glaring flaw of the study: The dosage used was about one-third the typical recommended dosage. This is a cute trick we’ve seen periodically in other alternative health care research: Use a ridiculously low dosage, and then send out the reports: echinacea, vitamin E, folic acid (fill in the blank) doesn’t work!
Well, we now have a rebuttal to NEJM’s echinacea study. And it comes from the prestigious journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
What? You never heard of The Lancet Infectious Diseases? Okay, maybe it’s a stretch to give it the hallowed title of “the prestigious,” but that doesn’t alter the fact that this study goes a long way in repairing echinacea’s unfairly tarnished reputation.
Echinacea and then some
In the new echinacea study, researchers from the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy performed a meta-analysis of 14 individual echinacea studies. Their conclusion: “Echinacea decreased the odds of developing the common cold by 58 % and the duration of a cold by 1.4 days.”
And a good vitamin C supplement might improve those numbers. The Connecticut team reports that one of the studies examined echinacea combined with vitamin C. The result: Risk of developing a cold dropped by more than 85 percent, compared to placebo. In that same study, subjects who took echinacea alone lowered their risk by 65 percent.
NutraIngredients-USA reports that Professor Ronald Eccles (director of the Common Cold Centre at the University of Cardiff in the UK) hailed the study, noting that it gives more validity to the idea of “harnessing the power of our own immune system to fight common infections with herbal medicines.”
But not just any echinacea extract will provide these beneficial results.
In previous e-Alerts, I’ve mentioned this rule of thumb in choosing an echinacea supplement: Potency runs from seed to root to leaf to almost none in the flower – so look for products that are extracted from the root. That advice comes from HSI Panelist Jon Barron who cautions that formulas containing echinacea flowers may also contain pollen, which can trigger allergic reactions.
Herbalists also recommend that echinacea not be taken daily for long periods of time. Among the several references I’ve read, some herbalists suggest two weeks should be the maximum, while others say a few weeks longer is fine. Talk to your doctor or an experienced herbalist who’s knowledgeable about your medical history before using echinacea.
