Everyday Sceptic #6

A snort or two at ‘natural’ H1N1 cures

Posted By Mark Gentili

Updated 3 months ago

First of all, if you’re reading this column and have any sort of cold or symptom, don’t cough in the direction of my photo — I don’t want to get sick.

In case the headline wasn’t clear enough, we’re going to be looking at natural “cures” for the H1N1 flu this week. I liked it better when it was called Swine Flu (or “Pig Flu” as my cousin Tommy likes to call it) to tell you the truth, it sounds more deadly somehow.

Before getting into that though, a couple of housekeeping items. First, a reader on our website criticized my spelling of “sceptic”, and suggested my spelling was as poor as my cogitating. For that reader, and the silent masses who also think I’m an idiot, there are two accepted spellings of “sceptic”, one British/Canadian (the way I spell it), and one American (“skeptic”). This same person also accused me of not backing up my claims. Check the website. If I’ve sources to list for a particular column, they’ll be there.

This says nothing about my intelligence, but my spelling is fine, thank you.

The second housekeeping item has to do with my column on vaccination in which I referred to the anti-vaccination crowd as “New Age nuts”. Normally, I don’t stand for ad hominem attacks, but the anti-vaxers make me so angry I couldn’t help myself. Frankly, I regret the insult — it’s much more effective and accurate to attack the argument, not the person. So, I’m extending the olive branch and offering an apology to any of the nuts I might have insulted with that column.

Now on with the show.

H1N1 influenza vaccine clinics unsheath their syringes across the region starting this week, so I thought I would take a little tour around the Net to see what our friends in the world of supplements, complimentary and alternative medicine had to say about the bug and how to stop it.

Naturally, every website hocking some kind of natural remedy (and all those websites try and sell you something) had nothing but good things to say about the flu vaccine, and nothing but negative things to say about vitamin C, Echinacea, ginseng and a few other herbs, spices and roots.

Okay, that was a joke.

I’m going to look at a few of more common ones: vitamin C, Echinacea, ginseng, colloidal silver and oil of oregano.

How did I check them out. Simple. I went to PubMed (the online database of the National Institutes of Health containing over 18 million articles publish in science journals big and small) and looked to see what science had to say. I checked out Wikipedia entries on the selected remedies and checked the sources of those articles for accuracy against several online resources.

Vitamin C

Since the eminent chemist Linus Pauling wrote a little book in the 1970s claiming that vitamin C could cure just about everything, it has become common knowledge that if you down a whack of ascorbic acid before you get sick, as you’re getting sick, or while your sick, it will prevent, reduce the severity or shorten the duration of an illness.

Everybody knows that’s the case. Even my mother.

Well, sorry to burst your orange-flavoured bubble, but dosing yourself with vitamin C ain’t going to do anything to help you. In fact, taking huge doses of vitamin C is really not very good for you.

Bottom-line: after more than three decades of study, more than 10,000 participants and something like 30 clinical trials, vitamin C has been shown to be completely ineffective at keeping you from getting sick.

Sorry.

Echinacea

Echinacea is a little plant with nice purple flowers that comes in nine different varieties. The Plains Indians are the ones most cited as using Echinacea as a remedy for all sorts of things (apparently preventing colds was not one of them though). And when it comes to herbal remedies, Native cures hold nearly as much cache as Chinese ones among alternative medicine crowd. It is claimed that the plant boosts the immune system (whatever that means) and helps you fight off colds.

A couple of studies did show some promising results on first blush, but the most significant one, a 2007 study from the University of Connecticut, was deemed useless by one of the U.S.’s top names in alternative medicine: Dr. Wallace Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.

The only randomized, double-blind study I could find was out of the University of Virginia and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a top-tier medical journal, by the way. Although criticized by companies that sell Echinacea-based products (duh, big surprise), that study found the plant and its constituents to be entirely useless.

Ginseng

Like many herbal remedies, ginseng is recommended for just about anything you can think of, including preventing or shortening the duration of cold and flu. Who hasn’t seen ads for “Cold-fX” (which contains American ginseng), and seen claims that it is clinically proven to work. It’s true that Health Canada has okayed the “clinically proven” phrase on the box and in the ads, and it is true that two studies supported the advertising claims. Those studies have been subject to criticism for not only how the studies were structured but also because so few people participated, fewer than 400. In fact, the “clinically proven” phrase does not appear on the package or in ads in the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration was not as convinced by the studies as was Health Canada.

Oil of oregano

I was a bit surprised to see ads hocking oil of oregano as a cure for H1N1. “Oil of oregano kills H1N1” one ad even claimed. I always thought it was just a flavouring for spaghetti sauce. Who knew?

So I went and checked it out, and oil of oregano has some amazing qualities. I found 176 published articles on the stuff and what it can do. The antimicrobial properties of thymol and carvacrol (the two active ingredients) are excellent. Oil of oregano can lengthen the shelf-life of fresh chicken legs, for example, by about two days because it has such effective antibacterial properties.

But is it napalm for Swine Flu?

I could not find a single study or article that even looked at that question. Not even in the alternative medicine journals. So where this claim comes from, I’ve no idea. Not just that, but only one study out of the 176 even looked at oil of oregano’s antiviral properties (that is, its ability to kill viruses).

And guess what, oil of oregano was not napalm for viruses. It wasn’t even a flashlight.

Colloidal silver

Colloidal silver is a fancy way of saying tiny silver particles floating in a liquid that one can ingest and gain amazing health benefits from. Plus, if you pan your urine (à la a prospector panning for gold), you can very quickly collect enough silver to make a very shiny toothpick (okay, I’m joking, so what?). Silver, like most metals, has excellent antimicrobial and germicidal properties, and those properties were exploited up to the advent of antibiotics. It was also used as a disinfectant Any bacteria that comes into contact with silver (or nickel or lead or iron etc. etc. etc.) will die in very short order. Silver is still used in the treatment of burns.

However, the alternative medicine crowd claims all sorts of benefits for colloidal silver, not the least of which is its ability to prevent disease by hanging around in the body and killing bad stuff that gets in there. There is no scientific evidence for any of these claims. There is ample proof though that overusing the stuff can result if argyria, an irreversible condition where silver accumulates in the body and turns people blue — Smurfs never get sick from what I understand.

Here’s the thing, if silver was that effective an antibiotic, mainstream medicine would be using it today and major drug companies would be marketing it themselves to cash in. They aren’t. If silver could cure AIDS, gonorrhea, epilepsy, the Achy-Breaky Heart or any of the dozens of other diseases colloidal silver sellers claim it can, we wouldn’t still be seeing those diseases, would we?

When we’re afraid, we’ll drop any amount of money in order to feel unafraid. Alternative medicine sellers and natural cure hockers know this, and take advantage of it (and you). When it comes to H1N1, you don’t need all kinds of nonsense to try and ward it off. If you get the flu, watch your symptoms. If it lasts too long, you’re fever doesn’t go away, or you can’t keep food or water down, get to the hospital or go see your doctor.

But remember, flu and colds are self-limiting. After a week or so, the virus will have run its course, and 99 per cent of people won’t be sick anymore.

Don’t get scammed. But don’t take my word for it. Be skeptical. Look it up yourself.

Happy sneezing!