Vitamins, acupuncturists, chiropractors, herbs, and so on. We all know someone who has used these “alternative” medicines before, or maybe even some of you do regularly use them. No matter what you may think these items do to help your health, in reality they don’t do anything. Via Bad Astronomer:

[A]fter a decade and 2.5 billion (with a b, folks) dollar spent, a government study shows that almost no alternative medicines worked.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

It’s always good to see a large and well designed long term study that shows the evidence, although this isn’t really a surprise. The placebo effect is a weird and powerful thing, and that’s what is used by these companies to help make them more than $20 billion a year. Sure, Big Pharma (as many of the people who are into alternative medicine say) make a lot of money too. But the medicines that make it to the public are tested and approved by the FDA and are regulated to make sure they don’t make false claims about what kinds of things the medicine does, or hide what kind of side effects they have.

That’s the reason that Airborne had to settle in their class action lawsuit and change their advertising. It’s a scary reason when you get down to it. Turns out there’s an article out this week about “natural” medicines and how other natural items like lead and arsenic were found in them after testing. The problem is that a large chunk of the items you find in a Health Food Store (vitamins, herbs, natural products) aren’t regulated. They bypass the FDA and go straight to the shelves, and the FDA can’t do anything to protect consumers until after enough serious complaints come in about a product.

People die because they hear that a friend’s sister took these pills to help with arthritis. It seems simple enough, and think “What’s the harm?” The harm is that there is no way of knowing how any medicine they currently take will be affected by the herbs or what kinds of side effects they might experience. Or even what is in the herbs themselves.

Please, do research and talk to your doctor before taking anything. As Tim Minchin said, “Know what they call Alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”

Technorati tags: alternative medicine, anti-science, whats the harm