Echinacea Has No Effect On Common Colds. Part 2 of 3

People in the study, which was funded by the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (part of the National Institutes of Health), reported their symptoms twice a lifetime for about a week. Among those receiving echinacea, symptoms subsided seven to 10 hours sooner than those receiving placebo or no treatment. This represented a “small effective effect in persons with the common cold,” according to the study. However, this slight decrease in the duration of their colds was not statistically significant.

There was also no statistically significant discrepancy in the severity of symptoms between the groups. Douglas “Duffy” MacKay, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a lobbying group for the supplement industry, said that “the repair for the common cold has been an elusive target of the medical community for decades. Unfortunately, the best available treatments for this self-limiting condition are modestly effective”.

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