Letters to the Editor

• my 2¢

  [Read the article: Claim your refund for useless Airborne cold supplement]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  If the placebo effect depends upon belief to work, then it should not work for a hard-core skeptic such as myself.

  I've never tried "Airborne," but I did, a number of years ago, at the insistence of some flakazoid friends who swore by it, start taking large doses of echinacea at the first sign of an impending cold. To my surprise, that worked very effectively, and reliably so, and has continued to do so to the present.

  I have no idea what the mechanism of action is -- and it's of course entirely possible that it is placebo effect. (Since, after years of effective use, I clearly do believe in it now. But I didn't at the outset of my initial trials of the stuff, which is what should have mattered, if credence is necessary to efficacy.)

  But since I used to get two to four medium-to-bad colds a year, and have had literally none since starting to rely on the echinacea as a preventative, it's pretty certain that there's something going on there.

  The echinacea's pretty cheap, too -- my current bottle of 100 50mg capsules has a price tag of $7.99 on it, and that's about an order of magnitude higher than prices I've seen on the web. Far less than the Airborne brand seems to be selling for.

  As always, YMMV.

  @cmhughesmd:

  A firm grounding in science, a high IQ, and a willingness to fall for medical silliness are not mutually exclusive. Double-Nobel laureate Linus Pauling was convinced that huge doses of vitamin C would work miracles, and not just on colds. I tried that one too at some point, and it did nothing for me.

  Permalink Wednesday, March 5, 2008 12:08 AM