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Herbal meds don't seem to work

I listened to a radio preogram the other morning on this topic. It was the regular tit for tat with a doctor in the studio explaining how thi#ese things fail trials and that any positive repsonse can be put down to other facotrs, chance or the placebo effect. The phone in participants all claimed how they know somebody who... etc. etc.

What was obnoxious though was the presenter who wound up preceedings with the final word. Her message to the listening world was: well, even if it is just a placebo effect it does something so it good. :rolleyes:


For those in Ireland it was Marian Funicane, what a dip stick.
 
Drooper said:

For those in Ireland it was Marian Funicane, what a dip stick.
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Seconded. Funny she used to be relatively sensible but at some point her ass started doing all the talking and she was never the same again.

Graham
 
Rats. I was going to forward the article to my sister-in-law who gives my nephew and niece echinacea. Unfortunately, the last half of the article provides enough wiggle room for her to ignore the results. Sigh.
 
Graham said:


Funny she used to be relatively sensible but at some point her ass started doing all the talking and she was never the same again.
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That quote just landed on my list of "Quotes that are too good not to steal"

I can think of lots of people that I could describe with that.
 
Irrespective of the claims for this one substance, the name of this thread is spurious: Herbal meds don't seem to work

Up until the early 1960s more than half of all the medications in the armentarium of mainstream medicine could trace their origin to plants and there are many such products in use today. Also: ethnobotanists and major pharamceutical companies are exploring the tropical forests of the world for new pharmaceutical molecules on a continuous basis.
 
SteveGrenard said:
Irrespective of the claims for this one substance, the name of this thread is spurious: Herbal meds don't seem to work

Up until the early 1960s more than half of all the medications in the armentarium of mainstream medicine could trace their origin to plants and there are many such products in use today. Also: ethnobotanists and major pharamceutical companies are exploring the tropical forests of the world for new pharmaceutical molecules on a continuous basis.
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well, going out on a limb here, but I think the thread name is indicative of the whole concept that the unregulated products and bogus claims of the naturalopathy advocates are being put to the test and failing. It has nothing to do with the medicines that are plant derived and then synthasized, purified, and tested after active ingredients are found.

I'm sure you already knew that though and threw in this comment for the fun of it.
 
A more appropriate name for this thread would've been "echinacea doesn't seem to work. "

I didnt throw this comment out to be funny or to have fun. The term herbal connotes and denotes any substance derived frm plant matter. As somebody somewhere else said, one of your more revered skeptics in fact, (loosely quoted)
"don't fight the dictionary on this." You can't have it both ways.

It is disigenuous to include an entire class of substances, especially one as large as this one, as the title for a story concerning a single specific substance.

Here is CNN's title for the story:

Study: Herbal cold remedy no help to kids

Widely used echinacea also linked to skin rashes
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I notice now that the original poster is new here so welcome to the forum and I am sorry if I was a bit harsh. My apologies.
 
Pay careful attention, this may be a one-off. (Except, to be quite honest, it isn't, Steve is perfectly rational when you get beyond the blind spots.)

Steve is, technically, quite right.

We all get sick and tired of people running around making spurious claims for herbal products, implying that "natural herbal" means safe, and generally ripping the public off. Not to mention the pots of money which get wasted running proper trials of these things, only to have them fail.

However. Extract of willow bark for a headache, anyone? Tincture of foxglove for heart disease? Yew tree for breast cancer?

The vegetable kingdom has a lot of highly pharmacoactive substances there. And sometimes this has been recognised by people who couldn't tell you what a cellular receptor is. Experience shows that the greatest usefulness is achieved when the active principle can be isolated and characterised, and often modified to increase activity while decreasing undesired effects. I'd rather have aspirin or digoxin or taxol than the native plant! And we must always remember that "natural and herbal" may very well mean seriously poisonous.

But if it weren't for the plants, the pharmaceutical industry would be a poor thing today.

Rolfe.
 
SteveGrenard said:
Irrespective of the claims for this one substance, the name of this thread is spurious: Herbal meds don't seem to work

Up until the early 1960s more than half of all the medications in the armentarium of mainstream medicine could trace their origin to plants and there are many such products in use today. Also: ethnobotanists and major pharamceutical companies are exploring the tropical forests of the world for new pharmaceutical molecules on a continuous basis.
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Even nowadays, about 25% of mainstream pharmaceuticals, by family, have their origins in plant products.

The thing is, though, that almost none of the people who tout "herbal medicines" will count any of these products. At all.
In theoretical terms, they usually make up a story about how plants are just chock full of synchronistic health-making goodness that is just totally ruined by Phallic Medicine, that is, any attempt to find out what chemicals do the stuff. Practically, if it the pills don't have brown specks in them, and they don't come in brown bottles that say "Nature's Way" or some such and have labels with happy frolicking white and possibly vaguely brown people on them, then it ain't Herbal.

This bugs me no end, because it used to be possible to go to aging hippie granola-head stores and buy actual plant products, which I used to make root beer. But now, I ask for yellow dock or wintergreen bark or sarsaparilla and they want me to buy some damned bottle of gelcaps.
 
Yes, technically Steve is right. But threads are misinterprated often by posters, and I still think Steve put up his comment to be cantankerous.
 
Suezoled said:
Yes, technically Steve is right. But threads are misinterprated often by posters, and I still think Steve put up his comment to be cantankerous.
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Hey if people didn't put up comments to be cantankerous then we'd have hardly any posts!
 
There are 'herbal remedies'(meaning the stuff they sell in health food stores) that do work...and those products have legitimate scientific research to back up the claims. Most of teh rest have been tested, been shown to have no effect, and are still being marketed. One of the dodges that the true believes use is to claim that negative results are 'inconclusive', and that until more testing is done they can assume the products work.
 
Suezoled said:
Yes, technically Steve is right. But threads are misinterprated often by posters, and I still think Steve put up his comment to be cantankerous.
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Absolutely not. It's obvious that I meant to be disingenuous.

Holy crap.
 
It can be dangerous to be too dissmissive of herbs. I've seen people refer to all herbs as being inert like sawdust. As if they were homeopathic.

But herbs can have real effects on the body. Marijuana, coffee, death cap mushrooms, etc. When it comes to skepticism of herbs, we just need to be careful about assuming they are completely harmless/effectless.
 
I wanted to post a link to an article. Perhaps I was in a rush and didn't title the thread appropriately. Perhaps I should have written "Herbal meds that don't seem to work." Perhaps I just wrote something to catch the eye and just assumed people would check the link and figure out what it was about for themselves. Perhaps I don't really care.

I work with the pharmaceutical industry and I'm well aware of the medical efficacy of certain plants and herbs. I guess I didn't realize that the thread title would be included in my final grade.
 
zultr said:
This shouldn't be very surprising.

cnn story
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What a stupifying conclusion. The CNN reports of just one study of one herb on one condition and the poster cites it as proof that all herbal substances do not work. I have a friend who smokes herbal substances for her particular medical condition and she says that particular herb works just fine. As to cold remedies, the real quarkery is in all of the "medically approved" chemical substances for colds purchased over the counter. Fact is, there is proveably far more quarkery to be found in Modern Medicine than anywhere else.

-- Rouser
 
Re: Re: Herbal meds don't seem to work

Rouser2 said:


What a stupifying conclusion. The CNN reports of just one study of one herb on one condition and the poster cites it as proof that all herbal substances do not work. I have a friend who smokes herbal substances for her particular medical condition and she says that particular herb works just fine. As to cold remedies, the real quarkery is in all of the "medically approved" chemical substances for colds purchased over the counter. Fact is, there is proveably far more quarkery to be found in Modern Medicine than anywhere else.

-- Rouser
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In reality, almost all the studies have shown taht almost all 'herbal remedies' are either 1) stuff modern science already knows about, in a less effective form, or 2) sour owl poop. People will say certain things work for them, but that's the the placebo effect; scientific studies don't confirm the anecdotal evidence.
 
Re: Re: Re: Herbal meds don't seem to work

Zero said:
In reality, almost all the studies have shown taht almost all 'herbal remedies' are either 1) stuff modern science already knows about, in a less effective form, or 2) sour owl poop. People will say certain things work for them, but that's the the placebo effect; scientific studies don't confirm the anecdotal evidence.
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LOL. We have come full circle. We are zeroed out on this now. Go back and read some of the posts that oppose your statement.
 
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