I’m allergic to dust mites, which has resulted in excessive sneezing every morning. A friend of mine gave me a bottle of Nature’s Sunshine Lymph Gland Cleanse because it would help my immune system. It’s a herbal dietary supplement, and it has the following listed ingredients:
Parthenium Aerial Parts and Root (Parthenium intergrifolium)
Goldenseal Root and Rhizone (Hydrastis canadensis)
Yarrow Aerial Parts (Achillea millefolium)
Capsicum Fruit (Capsicum annuum)
After two weeks of taking four pills a day to “see what happens,” I came across a comment on Reddit with a list of articles detailing a number of risks associated with the use of herbal medicine.
‘Herbal medicine’ is not one thing. Many plant compounds have pharmacological or physiological effects in the human body, and have been used effectively for a long time. Many of these have been tested for effectiveness according to modern scientific methods, found to be effective, and are now used as drugs, or drug precursors, or as the inspiration for synthetic analogues. And, of course, many were found to be useless. The ultimate test of effectiveness for an herbal remedy is when it becomes part of conventional medicine, and stops being considered ‘alternative’ medicine. For example, the most recent, state-of-the-art malaria drug series (artemisin and derivatives) was isolated in China from a wormwood species, which had been used for centuries as an antimalarial. (It’s worth noting that Artemisia was the only one out of several thousand herbal remedies they tried that showed effectiveness).
I have no idea about the specific substances you mention, but if you want I can search for links on Google Scholar. Or you could do the same, if you have access to a university library. The important issue though, is that there is no meaningful distinction between herbal and synthetic medicines. The important distinction is between medicines that have been scientifically demonstrated to work, medicines that have been demonstrated not to work or to have unacceptable side effects, and then a third class which haven’t been tested yet.
Maybe, maybe not, but there’s really no way to know-- there’s no regulation in place to make sure that the ingredients listed on the bottle correspond to what’s actually in the pills. In fact, a recent study showed that most herbal products the researchers tested did not contain what the labels said they did, or had additional ingredients not listed on the bottle. Some of the contaminants were dangerous.
I guess the theory would be that if I had better immune system support*, that I would stop sneezing.
I also don’t mind testing out treatment that’s only support by anecdotal evidence, but only if there is zero chance of harmful side effects. However, I can’t be too sure of that now, so I will stop.
*The product claims it provides immune system “support,” whatever that means.
Anything that claims to “support” or “boost” your immune system should be spread on the garden in lieu of manure because it is pure grade-A bullshit. Your immune system does not need to be “boosted.” A hyperactive immune system is the reason why you have allergies. A really hyperactive immune system can lead to autoimmune diseases. If it needs “boosting” then you probably have an immune deficiency disease like HIV and that’s a whole 'nother kettle of fish that some flowers in a gel capsule won’t be able to help you with.
Nothing in the human body needs or will benefit from anything sold as a “cleanse”. It makes something less than zero sense to “support” or “boost” one’s immune system in the case of allergy, which is an exaggerated immune response to something the body mistakenly thinks is harmful. In that case, you want your immune system to shaddup.
People with allergies should note that one component of that herbal formula (Parthenium integrifolium) is a member of the composite family, to which some people are allergic (case in point - I once suggested to a family member with hard-to-treat migraines that she try feverfew, which has been found effective in some folks. She promptly developed an itchy rash which went away after she stopped the feverfew).
Cautions regarding over the counter herbal remedies stem from their frequent lack of proven safety or efficacy, the fact that many of them do not contain the substances the labels claim they do, and the potential for adulteration or contamination, especially if ingredients are imported from countries with even less stringent standards than ours (i.e. China and India). Then there are potential harmful interactions with prescription drugs, little-publicized side effects (our awareness of liver damage is increasing) and the issue of forgoing effective medical therapy by experimenting with herbal drugs.
I’m not against all such uses, especially for minor conditions and/or nagging ones for which prescription meds aren’t especially good - if you look into the matter carefully, let your MD know you’re taking them, and are cautious about the source.
If you want to help your immune system, “cleaning out” your lymph glands is the last thing you’d want to do, since that’s where most of your immune system lives.
Real doctors don’t use the word “cleanse”. They use words which actually mean something, like specifying what specific chemicals are being removed by the therapy.
The word “toxins”, with no further details, is meaningless bullshit.
Some real therapies are about removing toxic chemicals from the body. The people using them specify which chemicals. Herbal woo scammers never do. Also, despite what the scammers say, people generally don’t go around with significant amounts of toxins in their bodies; that’s why we have liver and kidneys.
Real doctors are indeed trained in nutrition and preventative care.
If you really get into it with the herbal scammers and their idiotic die-hard believers, they’ll insist, they’ll demand, that nobody who learned real medicine knows anything about nutrition or preventative care. These are lies of the most obvious sort: Every doctor advocates eating right, losing weight, exercising, and generally taking care of yourself so you require less healthcare. They don’t say that eating nothing but grapefruits and olive oil will cure cancer, or whatever the idiocy of the day is, but that’s only because such nonsense doesn’t work.
If herbal medicine has something worthwhile, it gets packaged up and sold as real medicine.
That’s where medicine comes from. Aspirin comes from tree bark, but now it’s packaged up into pills of known strength with known side-effects and innocuous non-drug filler. Herbs, on the other hand, have unknown strength, unknown side effects, and filler chemicals which might have noxious effects of their own.
Therefore, herbal medicine is generally worse than real medicine, and mainly serves to enrich scammers.
There are safe herbs, and there are medicinal herbs, and there are herbs that are neither. There are herbs for which we don’t know which of those categories they fall into. But there is no such thing as an herb that is both safe and medicinal. This is because there is no such thing as any safe medicine. All medicines, no matter how derived, have side effects and risks. In order for something to be medicine, it must do something or another to your body. And anything you do to your body is dangerous, if you do it too much, or at the wrong time, or under the wrong conditions.
For plain ordinary medicines, the sort a doctor might prescribe, people have studied them carefully to determine exactly what the side effects are, under what circumstances those side effects come up, how to mitigate them, and whether they’re worth it for the medicine’s intended effect. With herbal medicines, though, this by definition has not yet been done. So if anything, you’d expect the side effects of herbal medicine to usually be worse than those of standard medicine, because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage them.
It means there is no evidence of any benefit, but by using a vague term like “support” they avoid running afoul of laws that address drug effectiveness and truth in advertising.
The reason for vague claims is that’s what they’re legally allowed to write without submitting their product to the testing required for FDA approval as a drug.
That blend is pretty benign, given a generally healthy individual. I wouldn’t recommend it long term, not out of concern for you, but out of concern for goldenseal, which is endangered. I use it for active infections, because it’s great at fighting them, but I prefer not to use it as a panacea. It does not have any properties that will specifically get rid of allergies, and that’s not a traditional use for it.
Yes, that’s a nice little blend if you’re fighting something external - a bacteria or virus. But it’s not particularly useful for allergies, nor is it sold for allergies, as far as I can tell.
If you’re fighting seasonal allergies, I’d recommend something with stinging nettles (freeze dried [urtica diocia](Urtica dioica)) and quercetin. Natural D-Hist by Ortho-Molecular is a good one.
Capsicum annuum is the common pepper (not black pepper, but bell pepper and the like). Most peppers sold in markets are of this species. All “capsicum fruit” means is peppers.
Achillea millefolium is common yarrow. Wikipedia says it can cause skin allergies (probably not a problem if taken internally), and that in rare cases it can cause allergic skin rashes and can increase the skin’s photosensitivity.
Hydrastis canadensis is goldenseal. Wikipedia says it can interact with many commonly used pharmaceuticals. The American Cancer Society lists a bunch of toxic effects, including indigestion, nervousness, depression and seizures. ACS also says that one of the compounds in goldenseal can disrupt heart rhythm.
A did a quick search and didn’t find much information on Parthenium integrifolium.
I should also say that allergies are caused by the body’s immune system reacting to a foreign substance. Even if this so-called “Lymph Gland Cleanse” boosted the immune system, that would do nothing to prevent or reduce allergies - if anything, it would make them worse.
Don’t mind Whynot, she does a good line in sounding authoritative, but I guarantee you she cannot cite any sound, scientifically based testing that has yielded signficant positive results for bacterial or viral infection for this particular snake oil.