Echinacea prevents colds, but should you be taking it?

Echinacea has long been touted as a natural way to ward off a cold, but research on the herbal supplement has been mixed. Recently, though, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy reviewed 14 different studies of echinacea to see if he could come up with a definitive word on it's effectiveness. What he found was that, when people took echinacea regularly, they had a 60% reduced chance of coming down with a cold and when they did get sick, the cold was shorter and less severe. It's thought that the phenols in echinacea "rev up" the immune system to fight off cold viruses.

No one is recommending, however, that you start taking echinacea on a regular basis (as study participants were). Long term effects are unknown and colds are not usually serious enough to warrant daily preventative medicine. In fact, some people, including those with immune system disorders -- like multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis -- should probably stay away from echinacea all the time. A more useful study, in my opinion, would be to find out whether echinacea is effective when taken only at the first sign of a cold, instead of every day.