To think perhaps herbal remedies do work?

[Hullabalooza]

I’ve always been quite herbal remedy sceptic. However since covid I’ve picked up every cold and chest infection going, often being ill to the point of needing to be in bed 3-4 times a winter.

In desperation, I started taking daily echinacea in November, and didn’t get ill for four months whilst taking them. I’m a teacher, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that children were coughing and spluttering all around me for weeks on end, colleagues going off sick and even in my own household whilst I (feeling slightly superhuman) got nothing.

I ran out of tablets in March and have now gone down with the early stages of a cold and nasty cough. Found a few echinacea in a drawer and literally feel like my body is battling between being ill and fighting it off depending on when I take them. I’m not fully ill like I’d normally expect after a few days.

Appreciate for the herbal sceptics this sounds like a load of crap but AIBU to wonder if there is really something in this stuff? My own anecdotal experience makes me wonder.

what are your thoughts and experiences with herbal remedies?

Some herbal remedies definitely work and have active ingredients.
No homeopathic remedies work (unless you count a placebo effect) and do not have active ingredients.

I make a lot of my own herbal remedies and most popular is a skin cream which helps with eczema and rashes. I have several before and after photos as evidence and friends repeatedly ask for it. Using plants such as calendula or chickweed to make the base oil, it has been proven to be effective amongst my friends and relatives.

This is nonsense.

20 years ago, the UK market for 'alternative' therapies was £1.6 billion, growing at around 15% per annum since. There's a lot of money in confirmation bias, placebos and science denial. Especially when you're not bound by the same ethical standards of testing and evidence that actual medicine is.

Loads of modern medicines arebased on herbal knowledge from thousands of years.
Echinacea is great for the immune system , as is stuff like elderberry tincture, ginger, chilli, garlic, honey.
Lots of common ailments are best treated with natural remedies.

The scepticism should be more for the people who think you can fight cancer with homeopathy and reiki, not for stuff like this.

PLEASE stop spouting this absolute nonsense. Honestly. The same as there's a cure for cancer that nobody can have due to "profits". For goodness sake.

You need to be careful about taking echinacea for that long OP. I think it probably says on the packet not to take for longer than two weeks.

no I am not linking to a specific case as I know some of these people personally, through my work and am not going to break confidentiality.

But yes, herbal remedies and herbal teas kill children. yes specific children have been killed by specific herbal remedies and specific herbal teas.

comfrey tea very often kills, other herbal teas too

no they don't. They just need to be clearly labelled with what they contain. Which is a herbal extraction of unknown chemical composition. So as long as you know you are taking a herbal remedy, you are assumed to have made the decision to take the risk

This is nonsense.

Apparently 100,000 people die from pharmaceuticals every year in the US

No problem just interested as I tried googling but I couldn't find a single case. There was a homeopathic teething product in the US that caused some babies to stop breathing but that's homeopathy and not a herbal product.

Herbal teas are generally so innocuous I'm stunned they could kill but I am sure you are right. I'm sorry you personally know people whose babies have died taking herbal products and teas. That's so sad for them and for you.

Beware of Chinese 'research' Mills putting out 'research papers' showing favourable results for traditional Chinese Medicine

Hundreds of papers, all Chinese produced and Chinese peer reviewed, support TCM, in spite of its immense depletion of wildlife, domestic animals (look up donkey skin trade) and plant life

TCM, is often practiced by absolute charlatans, who are often front for organised crime and many 'remedies' are outright dangerous or adulterated

TCM has been the cause of liver damage, as have some 'Ayurvedic' teas

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521244/

With so many bogus papers out there, often published in respectable sounding publications, it can often be hard to sort through it all

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK548589/

I agree about TCM - often uses plant extracts which are basically steroids, similar to those in conventional medicine, except in unregulated dosages......I've known people use traditional chinese medicine to avoid steroids, not realising that they are getting a steroid dose many times stronger through the traditional medicine - then they tell me, look, it works better than the conventional medicine

• yes! it does! you are getting results because you are massively over dosing and going way beyond safe limits!

Yes, this.

Thanks For everyone’s replies.

@Bakersdozens I’m really interested in what you’re saying and obviously you feel very strongly about this. Do you have any more specific information about particular items or cases? It sounds like it must be more widespread than just people you know, so it needn’t be breaking confidentiality to give general information or reported examples.

yes, I do feel strongly about this as I have known a nine year old dies from being given a herbal remedy and on another occasion, a parent sectioned, due to hallucinations from a herbal remedy, and their child, who had also taken it, ended up in paediatric intensive care. I used to be a GP receptionist. I knew these people well, and their whole families were devastated.

As I mentioned earlier, comfrey tea is the most dangerous herbal tea I have come across - I have known several deaths from this. However, other herbal teas and herbal remedies kill too - this is just the one I have heard of killing the most often.

if you go on Drugs.com the have info about pharmaceutical drugs plus reviews by users.
for every review that raves that X is the best thing ever there will be others saying that it gave them a myriad of side effects and problems so each drug causes different effects on different users.

It's the same for herbal stuff - for every raving review there's one criticising. Added to that there is not the same control over ingredients, purity, strength.
So you have loads of supplements that may or may not work, on top of that no controls over dosage etc.

Everyone is different, everyone has a different reaction. Who knows how good the herbal stuff is.

PS I have also known two children taken into care over concerns about the herbal tea their parents were insisting on giving them.

I am also a teacher and swear by Echinacea! I have only had one cold this year which was right at the start of winter when I had only just started to take it again. Since then all my colleagues and the children have had awful lurgies but I have been fine ( I did also have the flu jab!)

There is a definite place for homeopathy in the management of psychosomatic illness. My brother used to work in admin at the London homeopathic hospital, and a large proportion of patients were clearly bonkers, had had multiple tests and investigations in the NHS which had all come up as normal, and were now getting relief from their symptoms from homeopathy.

It sounded like the effect was mostly coming from the two hour long consultations, so the patients felt really listened to, and the ridiculously complicated treatment regimes which made the patients feel like there was a real art to the prescribing, and that it was really personalised to them.

The alternative was these patients bouncing around “proper” NHS appointments demanding more tests and scans, so a few hours of GP time and some drops of water seemed a good option for them. Shame it closed down really.

@Saschka when I studied psychology there were massive debates about prescriptions for placebos. Which is what homeopathy is.

80% of the painkilling effect of opiates is placebo. Taking heroin in an unfamiliar environment can kill you because of how your body and brain react, not the potency of the drugs.

On balance the ethical issues outweigh the practical ones. But there is a place for sugar pills in medicine and it does work because of exactly what you describe; listening and placebo.

I swore by valerian root to help me get some sleep when I was going through TSW (ironically, the worst experience of my life, caused by prescribed medication). Even when the heavy duty sleeping tablets of which doctors will not give you more than five, did nothing, valerian root gave me a few hours of rest.

I also believe that herbal supplements can be really beneficial - turmeric for inflammation, Starflower oil for regulating hormones etc.