Echinacea Has No Effect On Common Colds

Echinacea Has No Effect On Common Colds.
The herbal medicine echinacea, believed by many to heal colds, is no better than a placebo in relieving the symptoms or shortening the duration of illness, a recent study finds. "My advice is, if you are an adult and believe in echinacea, it's shielded and you might get some placebo effect if nothing else," said lead researcher Dr Bruce Barrett, an accessory professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin. "I wouldn't say the results of the trial run should dissuade people who are currently using echinacea and feel that it works for them, but there is no new documentation to suggest that we have found the cure for the common cold".

If echinacea was able to significantly reduce the symptoms and length of colds, this study would have found it. "With this detailed dose of this particular formulation of echinacea there was no large benefit". The boom is published in the Dec 21, 2010 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the study, Barrett's line-up randomly assigned 719 people with colds to no treatment, to a pill they knew was echinacea, or to a crank that could either be a placebo or echinacea, but they were not told which. The participants ranged from 12 to 80 years of age.

People in the study, which was funded by the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (part of the National Institutes of Health), reported their symptoms twice a daytime for about a week. Among those receiving echinacea, symptoms subsided seven to 10 hours sooner than those receiving placebo or no treatment. This represented a "small helpful intent in persons with the everyday cold," according to the study. However, this feeble decrease in the duration of their colds was not statistically significant.