Location Taken: Readfield, Wisconsin
Time Taken: June 2012
I vaguely recall when taking echinacea for colds became a thing. I was rather young, though, so it’s quite vague. It’s one of the few health crazes that have stuck around for a long time.
Not that there’s any documented advantages to it, despite multiple studies.
Now mind you, if you take it and feel noticeably better, you’re not just imagining things. Well, maybe you are, or – ok, it’s complicated, thanks to the placebo effect.
Human bodies have a lot of systems in place to help keep it running well, including some rather puzzling ones. And the placebo effect is one of the most puzzling.
Essentially, when you take something that you believe will help, whether or not it has any actual effects on your body, you have a good chance of feeling better. The body sees the belief and converts it into actual results.
Which is why any new drug has to go through thorough testing to make sure any effects are actually real and not just the placebo effect. Usual method is to find a few thousand people with the condition the drug is supposed to help and give half of them the drug and the other half an inert version of the capsule that looks identical, usually a sugar pill. Most people will have some change, others none, but that’s in both groups. And the drug will only be approved if it produces noticeably better results than the placebo grants, without too many negative side effects.
And what’s worse is, as human society gets more and more attached to the idea of pills curing all their ills, the placebo effect is getting stronger. It’s getting tougher and tougher (and thus far more expensive) for a pill in testing to beat the sugar pill. And old drugs that had major effects in the past, like Prozac, are failing to beat the sugar pills in new tests.
So all told, I suppose taking echinacea won’t hurt, and it might just help. It just won’t be doing it on it’s own, but through the tricky paths of the placebo effect. So if you want to spend your money on it, go ahead. It’s your money.
