Echinacea: It works; oops, it works not

0 Comments | USA TODAY, July, 2005 | by Elizabeth Weise

The National Institutes of Health has bad news for the millions of Americans who spend $155 million a year on the popular herbal remedy echinacea to treat the cough, runny nose and malaise that is the common cold: It doesn't work.

"It's not clinically effective," says Ronald Turner, an expert on the common cold at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and lead author on a major echinacea study.

The study, reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine, is the "most sophisticated" test ever done on the effectiveness of the herbal remedy, says Stephen Straus, director of NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which financed the work.

Researchers at the University of Virginia randomly gave 399 volunteers echinacea extract...