Most popular herbal medicines used by Australians

“Aloe vera, garlic and green tea are the most popular herbal medicines used by Australians, according to a new study”.

..is the opening paragraph from this article on the ABC.

The study found that 22.6% of participants had used at least one of the herbs in the past 12 months, with the highest use among 35 to 54 year-olds who were university-trained, and those who earned between A$60,000 and A$80,000 per year.

The study found that more than 90% of people felt their herbal medicine had been helpful in enhancing their general health and wellbeing, or providing relief from specific medical conditions.

This is not at all surprising for a whole range of reasons. Firstly these products are being marketed towards such people and as they are expensive can be expected to be the buyers. Secondly, their confidence in their own ability would be quite high, they have been to University for heavens sake! And thirdly with the placebo effect of roughly 30 % for such nondescript chronic illnesses as these herbs are generally used, this is roughly the percentage of of people who can fall for this. Of this group the ones who think these herbs work are the ones who will keep on using them. Lets face it, this is free choice here so the 90% is not surprising.

Now many of these herbs might have active ingredients and may do some good however the willingness for educated people to put something into their bodies they know little about is a worry. Many of these products are only licensed with TGA and have not been tested in the same way other medicines have been. I have seen the claims that it is too expensive to run “proper trials”, figures of billions of dollars get bandied around however I will call bullshit on this. It does not cost billions or even millions. Try a few hundred thousand for a proper blinded trial to gold standard. If you want to lump in the costs of advertising, free promotional material to doctors etc. good try but sorry, I’m counting actual costs.

What I can’t understand is why these companies are not trying to improve their product? In the reality based world most companies run a constant improvement program to improve their products however in the the traditional medicine area it seems like the high point of medical understanding was achieved a few thousand years ago. This beggars belief. Think about it..what people thought thousands of years ago is seen as better than now? In contrast let’s compare geology, physics, chemistry and biology. No-one is using ideas from then, they have all been improved because science has shown what we thought was wrong and people were willing to learn from their mistakes and adopt new ideas. Even biology.

And yet here we are the 21st century with a fantastic understanding of the human body and how it works and people are thinking that traditional is better, with hardly any supporting evidence. And these companies are not displaying the behavior of scientists who are trying to improve upon what they know.

It’s simply another case of dogma trumping science and it’s stupid.