That Magical Herb

I admit, I am a bit of a germaphobe. In classes, as sneezes detonate around me, I find myself holding my breath, waiting for the plague-baring droplets to clear from the air before I re-open the passages to my warm, moist and spongy lungs. I even impose a personal quarantine on obviously contagious friends.

And yet, even taking these preventative measures, I regret to say that I am now sick, but true to Homer Simpson style, I must hold that this illness is everyone’s fault but mine. Yes, I try to wash my hands before every meal, I get plenty of sleep, and choke down those immune system-building veggies. I avoid idly touching mucous membranes and (involuntarily) avoid any wholesale bodily fluid transfers. It is all of you who don’t get enough sleep, don’t eat right and suck face like there’s no tomorrow, then come to class to inject your fellow more puritanical classmates with your pestilence. By treating illness as just another challenge to overcome you allow sickness to smolder in your bodies, spewing viri like smoke into classrooms for weeks.

I used to have one near-mystical defense against the ever-present pathogen fog: Echinacea. I still recall the first time that I encountered the magical herb. My prefect expounded on the palliative effects of Echinacea, and suggested taking three little green meanies any time we even thought that a little tickle might be forming at the back of our throat. At the time, being of sound mind and body, I scoffed at this quaint notion. Taking herbal supplements sounded more like witchcraft than modern medicine. If this stuff did anything, I reasoned, researchers would have found out about it, analyzed it, extracted the active ingredients, and marketed the remedy to consumers. I felt saved and superior in my tower of Panglossian reasoning.

Of course, a few weeks later as a tickle at the back of my throat turned from marching ants to fire ants to bombardier beetles, I retreated from this tower. The dread of oncoming cold quickly squeezed out any scientific haughtiness I may have harbored, and I marched to CVS to buy my first bottle of Echinacea. For my entire sophomore year I supplemented my vitamin-C (a habit I could justify by appealing to the “anti-oxidant” powers of ascorbic acid) with little capsules filled with what looked like old grass clippings.

And lo, I was not once sick the entire year. Somehow as a sophomore I dodged every sneeze-induced shotgun blast of tainted phlegm from every runny nose in every lecture hall. I was invincible. At the end of this glorious, deep-breathing year, being once again of sound mind and body, I half-heartedly tried to convince myself that these non-scientifically sanctioned herbs and spices were not responsible for my well-being. Echinacea’s correlation with inexplicable health by no means implied causation, right? Thus, when the big bottle of meanies ran out, I neglected to replace it—and promptly contracted some sort of month-long affliction the likes of which I thought only occurred in dense tropical jungles below the Tropic of Cancer.

Upon hearing my voice through the phone grow more and more flinty and my b’s and m’s become more and more indistinguishable over the weeks, my mother eventually forced me to tell her the epic tale of the mystical Echinacea capsules. Horrified that I might be taking some sort of drug she had never heard before, she did a little research on the supplement, and shamed me into admitting my ignorance.

And that brings us to today’s malady and my current drive for intellectual cleanliness. From the various reviews and meta-studies that I was able to access on PubMed, it seems that most Echinacea studies suffer great methodological deficiencies, and when only scientifically sound studies are considered (i.e. studies that control for the placebo effect), Echinacea produces a modest if not nonexistent effect.

So, by investigating the magical herb, it seems I have likely destroyed its power. The ignorance that created the placebo-powered cold-busting green torpedo has given way to an understanding of sterile, uninspiring data. While it seems that in this case, ignorance may have been healthful bliss, I must believe that the loss of some small area of mystery under the boot of scientific progress, no matter how inconvenient now, can only be rewarded in the future.

I will not second-guess the value of any kind of knowledge. Soon the process of exploration that led to the death of my magical herb might lead to the death of the common cold itself. I await this day eagerly, with the more prosaic remedies of Dristan® and Nyquil® at my side.

B.J. Greenleaf ’01 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.