Echinacea's efficacy for colds debunked
'No evidence that it actually does anything'
- Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
Thursday, July 28, 2005

Echinacea, the herbal remedy used by millions of Americans for fighting
the common cold, does not ward off runny noses, sore throats or
headaches, nor does it help speed recovery from cold symptoms, according
to the results of a major clinical study released today.

"We find no evidence that it actually does anything to common cold
symptoms," said Dr. Ronald Turner, a professor of pediatrics at the
University of Virginia School of Medicine and lead author of the study
reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. "If that's the reason
you're buying it, then you're wasting your money."

While other studies have shown similar results, echinacea enthusiasts
said they did not think the latest study merited such a clear-cut
conclusion. They noted that Turner and his colleagues used only the root
portion of one version of the plant from which echinacea is derived --
the purple coneflower -- and said the dosage given was too low to
register any positive effect.

"This is a good contribution to the clinical literature, but it's not
the definitive study on echinacea," said Mark Blumenthal, executive
director of the American Botanical Council, a nonprofit group backed by
herbal supplement makers whose logo includes a purple echinacea flower.
"I just wish it had been a bigger study with bigger dosages."

Americans spent $153 million on echinacea products last year, making it
one of the five best-selling herbs in the country, according to the
Nutrition Business Journal, an industry publication based in San Diego.
It comes in capsules, tablets, tonics, powders, lozenges, tea bags and
even gummy vitamins for children. But spending has been declining
steadily since 2001 as some users become disillusioned with the product,
said editor Grant Ferrier.

"With a lot of herbal botanicals, including echinacea, there's not a
tangible effect," Ferrier said. "It's not like taking a pill for a
headache. A lot of it goes on faith."

The study included 437 people who volunteered to have cold viruses
dripped into their noses. Some took echinacea for a week beforehand,
while others got a placebo. Others swallowed echinacea or a placebo at
the time they were infected.

Then the subjects, mostly college students, 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, which some had hypothesized 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
get 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.

While some echinacea researchers say more study is needed, Dr. Stephen
Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine, which sponsored the new study, says he, for one,
is satisfied that echinacea is not an effective cold remedy.

"This paper says it will not pre-empt a common cold, and it stands on
top of prior studies saying it doesn't treat an established cold,"
Straus said. "We've got to stop attributing any efficacy to echinacea,"
he added.

Echinacea, a member of the same plant family as sunflowers and daisies,
was used for hundreds of years by more than a dozen American Indian
tribes to treat snakebites, toothaches, coughs and other ailments.

Western doctors began recommending it in the 19th century. It became
popular in the United States in the 1960s as consumers embraced herbal
alternatives to traditional medicine. No less an authority than the
World Health Organization recognized echinacea as a treatment for colds
in 1999.

In an accompanying editorial to the study, Dr. Wallace Sampson, an
emeritus clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University School of
Medicine, questioned why the government was wasting tax dollars on
funding alternative medicine studies, some of which have turned out to
be nothing but snake oil.

"Research into implausible remedies rarely produces useful information,"
wrote Sampson, who was not connected to the study.

But one of the study's co-authors, Dr. Rudolph Bauer, a professor of
pharmaceutical biology at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, Austria,
said the study should be repeated with other echinacea species and with
other preparations and with different doses.

"I am always in favor of further studies," Bauer said. He himself takes
echinacea and will continue to take it, he says.

The New York Times contributed to this report.

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[
Advocates of "alternative medicine" often complain that, unlike "the big
pharma companies," they just don't have the funds to perform scientific
studies or clinical trials.

Yet for echinacea at least, there have now been *several* scientific
studies to investigate its usefulness for treating or preventing the
common cold, published in peer-reviewed journals.  None has shown any
useful effect.

Scientific research continues on other alternative remedies as well.
The MedLine database is a good place to start looking.
]