Echinacea

I want to clear up some things about echinacea.  A few years ago, someone did some scientific research on the claim that echinacea consumption could boost the immune system and make people more resilient to disease.  In the study, they found people who were already sick, and they treated them with the herb.  They found no benefits to echinacea treatment.

Now, I am not claiming to be an expert on this subject, but my mother and her mother both practice traditional herbalism, and I recall a great many things my mother told me about various herbs, especially echinacea.  Before I continue though, I want to make something very clear.  At least some traditional herbalism does work.  This is not merely ancient witchcraft that is based purely on superstition.  There are several plants, when prepared as salves, that do things like increase or decrease blood flow to the area they are applied.  There are plants that can be used in poultices and salves that reduce pain.  In fact, there are plants that can have effects similar to a great number of pharmaceuticals.  Due to lack of scientific research (because most researchers summarily discard herbalism as witch doctor medicine, without any evidence), it is not clear how plant medicines compare to pharmaceuticals, and there is not much information about side effects, but the fact is, there is evidence that many traditional herbalism plants have potentially beneficial effects.  In my opinion, we need medical researchers to get off of their high horses and actually do some research in this field, but until they do, we are pretty much stuck with ancient wisdom and simple observation.

Echinacea is supposed to boost the immune system.  In more recent times, it is treated as a medicine, but I don't think it was always treated this way.  There are a lot of products and various claims out there suggesting that taking echinacea when sick can help you get well faster, but this is not what I was taught, and in fact, I had not even heard of this particular claim until the last 10 or 15 years.  What my mother taught me was that echinacea could not be very beneficial for curing an existing disease, because its beneficial effect is not instant.  She said that the immune system boosting benefits of echinacea took some time to appear, and that one would have to consume the herb regularly.  In other words, she treated the herb as a supplement instead of a drug.  Just like consuming vitamin C as soon as you get sick is not going to be of much help, waiting till you are sick to consume echinacea is not going to help either.  Vitamin C supplements help the immune system by keeping the body in better shape, not by suddenly making it be in better shape as soon as you take it, and if you have not been getting enough vitamin C, it is necessary to consistently take supplements over a period of time for it to have significant benefits.  Again, this is how I was taught echinacea works.

This leads to a serious problem.  I don't actually know if echinacea boosts the immune system or not, but there are millions of people who think that the claims that it does are crap, because one study showed that treating it like a medication does not work.  Conducting research in this way, and making wide conclusions based on narrow evidence, is dangerous and unethical.  The study did not prove that echinacea is ineffective in boosting the immune system.  It only proved that taking the herb once already sick is not effective.  Now, I said I don't know if the herb is effective or not, but what if it is.  What if, in their hubris, these researchers have dismissed a very effective immune system booster, because it did not fit their specific assumptions about how it should work?  In the best case, we could be unnecessarily losing a lot of time and money to sickness that could have been avoided.  In the worst case, people could be dying because of this.

Here is the way I see it: Perhaps long ago herbalists discovered that people who drank echinacea tea (a common mode of consumption) got sick less often than those who did not.  Maybe this was a fluke but maybe not.  This knowledge was passed down through generations until modern times.  Then, some commercial interest read a line somewhere on the internet saying that echinacea "boosts the immune system," and taking it totally out of context (or perhaps they did this deliberately, just to make their product sound good), used it as an ingredient in a product designed to treat an existing condition.  From there, consumers read the labels, which listed the ingredients and mentioned that echinacea boosts the immune system, and these consumers made the same error in assuming it is good for treating disease.  From there, some researchers who had not actually done their research on the herb took up the claim and decided to test it, again, taking it completely out of context.  Of course they found the claims to be false, because they made some false assumptions about the meaning of the claim.  From there, they boasted that they had disproved the claim, saying that echinacea has no immune benefits whatsoever, again missing out on essential context as well as making very wide conclusions from very narrow data.  If we applied this same logic to testing vaccines, we would have found that vaccines cannot treat disease long ago, and we would not be using them today.

The fact is, when we test pharmaceuticals, we do rigorous testing.  We make sure we test the claims exactly as they are intended, and we also look for side effects.  If we find that claims are not met, we don't imply that a drug is not useful for anything.  Instead, we discard the specific claims that were made, without making any conclusions about other claims.  In short, the research that "proved" echinacea is ineffective for boosting the immune system was poorly conducted and less than rigorous, and it certainly does not meet the standards of pharmaceutical research.  Some might say that non-pharmaceutical medicine should not be held to the same standards.  This is extremely bad science, especially when comparing pharmaceutical medicine to other medicine.  A comparison of any two things that does not hold both things to the same standards is an invalid comparison.

What about echinacea then?  Well, the study seems to have proved that it is not a good treatment for disease.  It is good that the study proved this, since a number of companies are using this false claim to market ineffective products.  The study did not prove that the herb is ineffective for boosting the immune system though, and the fact that it claimed that it did prove this may actually be more damaging than any good it did.  Of course, for those that understand this, they can just ignore the unsubstantiated claims, but how many people have been duped by this?  If echinacea is effective for boosting the immune system, how much damage is being caused by this false conclusion?

Echinacea has been disproved as a treatment for disease, but the only people claiming that it was a good treatment were for-profit businesses essentially acting as medical quacks (as well as the customers they duped).  I think it is important that we test the serious claims, because if the herb really is good for boosting the immune system, we should be taking advantage of that (including the possibility of isolating the active compounds to make better immune boosting pharmaceutical drugs), and if it is not good for boosting the immune system at all, we should be letting the public know, so we can put our resources into more promising things.

What it all comes down to is, there is no reason for modern medicine to demonize the various forms of traditional medicine (except, perhaps greed).  This is especially applicable to herbalism, which has given us many useful drugs from morphine to aspirin and a great number of other very valuable pharmaceutical drugs (and yes, some illegal drugs, which we are, ironically, starting to discover have very valuable pharmaceutical value of their own).  Attacking and misrepresenting herbalism is dangerous on several levels, one being that we miss out on the opportunity to improve medicine by observing nature, another being that we discourage people from using what might be the best remedy for their condition, and the last being that we cause people who have real knowledge and experience in herbalism to distrust modern medicine.  One of the biggest reasons we even have fear of vaccines in our culture, is because people distrust the medical industry, exactly because that industry is attacking their knowledge and beliefs.  These people know that the medical industry does not have evidence to back their attacks, and that makes it easy to distrust any evidence claiming that vaccines or other pharmaceuticals are safe.  It has been made clear that the medical industry is more interested in profits than anything else, and knowing that makes it easy to believe that they don't care about human safety.