It's good to see Exeter University's professor of complementary medicine expressing serious doubts about the validity of many herbal remedies. Most of them, apparently, don't work and may even be harmful. This ought to be self-evident but, for an ever-increasing number of people, from Prince Charles down, hocus-pocus continues to exercise its awful appeal. I broke my shoulder just over a year ago and was recommended homoeopathic pills to encourage the bone to heal. As I wasn't prepared to break the other shoulder to provide myself with a control group I've no idea how efficacious they might have been, but common sense (remember that?) suggests that sugary pellets that contain not the slightest measurable trace of any active ingredient probably didn't have much effect on my compound fracture. Maybe I should have used crystals.
Interesting though that the Independent should consider the findings of Professors Ernst and Canter to be 'controversial'. Next thing we'll be reading that doubts about the credibility of the virgin birth or the transformation of Hyacinth, son of Amyclas, into a spring bulb are 'controversial' as well. The only thing that doesn't appear to be controversial any longer is the weight given to superstition in daily discourse. Italian news programmes talk regularly about miracles as though they'd actually taken place, which is at least as worrying as the presence of herbal 'medicines' on chemists' shelves.
2 comments:
Germany has a group, Commission E, that does solid scientific evaluations of natural and herbal remedies. Very open-minded and even-handed.
The weird thing about medicine and nurtition is that it is the one area of science that isn't international. In chemistry or physics, if someone in Germany does research and gets a solid scientific result (with peer review and confirmation), then that result is taken seriously in every other country. WHo cares where the research was done?
But in medicine and nutrition, folks like the USFDA pay not attention to results for overseas research. Scientific results have no real standing unless the research was done it the US. It's utterly bizarre.
This is absolutely new to me and, you're quite right, patently absurd.
I wonder if the Exeter findings are confirmed by Commission E (does the letter have anything to do with the E coding used for food additives in Europe, or is this a coincidence?).
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