Re: New attack on herbal medicine by Prof Ernst and colleagues

"One can publish anecdotes, single case reports and uncontrolled trials and get all kinds of hopeful-looking results that can't be replicated, and wind up deceiving users of herbs. The same "harsh" criteria for quality research apply to pharmaceutical drug studies as well"

By that I take it you mean those impeccable pharmaceutical studies that return positive results to the funders in five times as many instances as the independent ones do?  The same studies that the FDA has been lambasted for woefully negligent oversight within just the past week?  The ones that assured us of the safety of Vioxx, Bextra, Alleve, Fosamax, Gardasil, Avandia, Mercury Vaccines, Amalgam Fillings, Chlorine and Flouride and Aspartame?  The reams of scientific studies that told us that tobacco was harmless for decades? I could go on for a few pages here . . .

In which case I will gladly trust anecdotal studies and stories of people who actually got well instead of what any pharmaceutical industry study tells me.  Pharmaceutical studies provide the results they were paid to provide - and our health, insurance costs, and taxpayer dollars pay the price.

What had you rather have - something that people for centuries and even millenia have been saying that works, that people have tried and found to work and so have passed it down from person to person and generation to generation for centuries because it does indeed work (and that is the ONLY rational explanation for why any natural remedy or herb would continue to be used for so long. Good word does not keep being passed along if people do not get well, or drop dead).

Or, would you rather have drugs that largely don't work and almost never actually cure, durgs that people try and end up with other conditions and more drugs, and they don't work either - but they keep being used because of billions of dollars of advertising telling us to "Ask Your Doctor" and a pharmaceutical rep for every 1.5 doctors? Not to forget hidden danger reports (see Vioxx, Aspartame, et al),  altered studies, and suppression of natural alternatives that do work by the greedy SOB's who value profit over our lives?

Regardless of the cover story, the fact remains that only 3 papers were chosen to justify making headlines that condemned all herbal CAM uses.

Just curious: would 3 out of 1345 be a good overall indicator of the percentage of validity in scientific papers about medicine?  Or is there some great conspiracy to only write bad papers about herbs?  What are  the odds? Speaks highly of the so-called science mainstream medicine relies on, doesn't it?  And don't even try to give me any rationalization for how good mainstream medicine science is.  We have hundreds of thousands of graves attesting to that already.

Mainstream medicine - the number two cause of death in America.  Yessir - I would be proud indeed to be a mouthpiece for that!  And btw, that is exactly why this forum was created in the first place!

DQ