Luckily we have the FDA looking out for our health and best interests (joke!).
You do realize that the FDA employees and their families use this medicine, right? They've got a bit of a vested interest in actually looking out for us.
Yes, I always trust my government to look out for me too. Anyway, never mind the rank and file employees. They don't make the important decisions. How about the decision-makers of the FDA? Are they trustworthy? They're often pharmaceutical industry insiders (and when they're done working at the FDA, they often go right [back] into the industry). Fox, hen house, anyone?
I won't waste anyone's time posting lots of links to stuff you can easily research yourself, but here's one good example of a no-good FDA commissioner who actually got canned.
In the words of another writer:
However, the profits up for grabs have become so enormous that critics say the goal of industry-controlled research is no longer focused on finding a cure for cancer to save lives. Instead, the focus is on thwarting the development and approval of new therapies in order to protect the profits of the treatments already on the market. (source; emphasis mine)
I mean, come on, READ the article you just linked: "The results in The Lancet Infectious Diseases conflict with other studies that show no beneficial effect."
I have. The conclusions of the cited study were based on the results of 14 previous studies! As stated, some previous studies haven't shown any preventative or ameliorative effect of Echinacea. Those might have been commissioned by people with a vested interest in "proving" Echinacea ineffective. Or maybe they were done by incompetent researchers. Maybe they were using some adulterated form of the herb that wasn't effective, or based on the wrong variety (before you call 'bullshit', consider the difference in "effectiveness" of smoking industrial hemp vs. smoking recreational marijuana; all varieties of the same plant).
I'm sure I could design with a study that would pass the average peer review AND fail to show any positive effect of Echinacea (especially if those "peers" were biased towards, or at least expecting, the stated results). Perhaps I could design one to show positive results. The question is, what is my vested interest in proving something one way or another? Even if there's no personal benefit involved, do I have a preconceived notion of what the results will be? Let's say I carefully design a double-blind study, and the results, to my chagrin, prove something that is extremely financially detrimental to me and/or my employer. Will I lose my funding grants? Will my employer even allow it to be published? Will my conscience demand that I publish it, or will I leave it to the dust heap of history because I must feed my family? It's incredibly naive to assume that all "scientific" studies are accurate. Especially when you see similar ones appearing to contradict one another.
In my first post, perhaps I shouldn't have been so bold as to say Echinacea *does* have value. I don't know that. Some studies have shown it to be so. Some have shown otherwise. My personal experience is generally positive, but obviously that could be the placebo effect at work. Good thing it's cheap; if I'm wasting my money, at least I'm not wasting much.
Speaking of money--although alternative medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry in the US, it is still dwarfed by the pharmaceutical industry. The more money you've got to prove your point (which will help you get more money), the more skeptical I'm going to be about your "scientific evidence". The Dairy Council advocates eating lots of dairy products (and they cheerfully supply free "nutritional" information to schools; do you think they're going to warn about the dangers of excessive dairy consumption?). The Cattlemen's Beef Association (for one) advocates eating lots of beef.
Just a couple decades ago, this sort of diet was accepted by most people as healthful. Only in the face of the inescapable evidence to the contrary has American society finally started to realize that, generally, the less of those things you eat, the better (and you certainly don't need them to be healthy). Similarly, the pharmaceutical industries advocate taking their drugs, make enough campaign contributions to get their cronies appointed to the FDA, and pay for studies to "prove" their points. Of course, they also pay for doctors to go on holidays, golf retreats, and provides lots of other incentives to get them to sell you drugs you might not need. I'm not trying to imply that everything they say is wrong and every drug is harmful. But I'm sorry, they're hardly very trustworthy.
As an analogy to bring things back to a more traditionally slashdotty perspective, how about all the studies commissioned (directly or indirectly) by Microsoft to show the alleged superiority of Windows? Whether or not you agree with their conclusions, do you not see the need to be skeptical, given their sources? But wait, their families trust that same software, so it must be OK! =)
The first article you cite is nearly two years older than the one I cited. The second one is over three years older! This is what you call "more recent"? Perhaps those are some of the ones you read about (you read it, right?) in the BBC article I previously linked to. Cherry-picking, you say? Well I don't know about that, but it might have supported your argument if you'd picked studies done since the one I cited, from 2007. I don't doubt some exist.
And mmmhmm, OK... what's so damning about that last one? I haven't read the whole thing, but I have heard of that study before, and the quote you chose doesn't say anything that contradicts anything in my original post. That article does say Echinacea "can cause immune suppression" but that contradicts your other studies, which purport to show no statistically significant effect of Echinacea! If you're going to cite studies to support your argument, they probably shouldn't contradict each other. =)
Argument from ignorance and unstated major premise. You're implying that there HASN'T been much research done, either because you don't know or you don't accept the negative findings.
I'm implying no such thing. That's a conclusion you chose to make. And forgive me if my hastily written original post led you to believe me ignorant. Sure, billions have been spent on so-called "alternative medicine" research--still a fraction of that spent on synthetic medicines. But in any case, money spent doesn't equal good research. And if your research is funded by someone with a financial interest in the results, those results are suspect (yes, I do consider all research to be suspect).
Problem is, if you can pick it from a forest or a field, there's no money in it for the shareholders... unless you can purify/extract/synthesize and patent it (after all, aspirin was originally derived from willow bark).
You claim that a company would not develop a medicine if it can't turn them a profit. Then you provide a direct contradiction of your claim. If no company had further developed aspirin, we'd still only get it from willow bark.
Ahem. No, I didn't. If Bayer's once-patented formulation of acetylsalicylic acid wasn't more effective than chewing on willow bark, they surely... wait, WHAT? Are you implying no one has made money on aspirin?! Please re-read what I wrote, especially the bit starting with "unless".
I doubt either of us has read the book which is the subject of this review, and I'm really not sure what we're arguing about. My general points were: some herbal remedies are efficaceous; many drugs are not; don't trust big corporations or their affiliated political appointees to look out for my best interest (so keep an eye on them and take what they say with a grain of salt); and if you can pick it in the wild or easily formulate it yourself, it's unlikely you'll find major pharmaceutical companies looking into it.
