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June 26, 2007

echinacea

Lancet has published a meta analysis of echinacea to prevent and treat the common cold. There are 1 billion colds a year in the US. I will not pay for this article online and do not have access to the article so I am relying on the news articles (of which there must have been thousands). They found (not clear if this was over the whole meta-analysis or in one of the 14 studies reviewed) a 58% reduction in colds and shortened the course by a day and a half. Are they implying that there could be less than half a billion colds next year if we all took echinacea?

Did they study the percentage who had bad allergic reactions? The absolute worst case of anaphylaxis I have ever seen in 20 years of ER was from echinacea. And an Australian study showed up to 20% of atopics had severe allergic reactions of one type or another. Do we really want 4% of the population to have life-threatening reactions just to prevent the common cold?

I personally hate a cold. And I occasionally take Vit C and Zinc based on Art Robinson's research back in Linus Pauling's lab, thinking I am warding off a cold a few times a year. But I am not sure that even that pill-popping is worth the trouble.

Clinical Iatrogenesis | By Robert Maddox | 01:14 PM

Comments

I occasionally take vitamin C, zinc & echinacea, too, which all seem to help with colds. At least sometimes...certainly not always. Then again, that could be because my bottles of C & echinacea are way past expiration and have not always been stored in a "cool, dry place" - they've been in non-air-conditioned storage. Some pharmacist's son I am, huh?

Posted by: jon at June 27, 2007 09:44 AM

Interesting about the allergic reactions, too - I'm pretty sure I'm allergic to naproxen, but maybe I'm allergic to echinacea, too (which I've taken together in the past to treat symptoms of what was probably allergic reaction to one or the other or both of them!). I recently took C & echinacea along with some zinc lozenges and ended up with mouth ulcers reminiscent of prior allergic reactions. And I've read that zinc lozenges can help mouth ulcers, but in my case they only made them worse - although that could be due to the fact that I've often used zinc lozenges that also contain echinacea (and C).

Posted by: jon at June 27, 2007 10:01 AM

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