Does Echinacea really work?!

Does Echinacea really work?

I have a cold and someone recommended that I take Echinacea to help me get over it. Have you ever used and had good/bad experience with it?

Echinacea may save you some sick days when colds strike, but it doesn't seem to prevent them.

Researchers have gotten mixed results using echinacea to treat colds. In some studies the herb appears to work quite well, in others not at all.

When researchers have tried using echinacea to prevent colds, however, they've generally been disappointed. For example, in one recent study, reported in the June 2000 issue of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, researchers gave 117 people either echinacea or a placebo for two weeks, then exposed them to cold viruses. Those who took the echinacea were just as likely to develop a cold as those who took a placebo. Other research suggests that taking echinacea for too long might actually weaken your resistance to cold viruses. In fact, Commission E says that you shouldn't take echinacea for longer than eight days in a row.

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."

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.