How do you know what herbal treatments actually work?
Pro tip: . The real answer is not “Read it here on 3BY!” … or at least that’s not the full answer.
Truth is, many herbal remedies, health advice, etc. work very well. Another truth is, there are also a lot of claims made that don’t hold up to real scrutiny. Testing everything oneself is too time consuming, as well as potentially dangerous or impractical. How do you know what information to go with?
Salty and I address herbal treatments and research in this podcast:
Go to the source
One approach that helps is to go to the source. A surprising amount of the things ‘everybody knows’ about herbal treatment is information that is spread around with the best of intentions by people who’ve heard it other places and thought it must be true. When you try to trace this information back to the source… it turns out it just started as somebody’s ‘seemed to make sense’ guess. Ever heard the one about needing to drink eight glasses of water a day? That’s one made-up ‘fact’ I’ve seen in a good two dozen different articles.
You avoid this ‘common wisdom’ problem by getting information from people who personally know. Get your reviews from people who’ve actually tried the product / herbal remedy (do I have to mention that they’re way more reliable if they have zero financial interest in the review?) . Get your advice on how to do things from people who do them. If it’s not clear if the source has any personal experience … more likely than not, they don’t. That’s something that tends to come out when one writes.
To sort out if medical treatments (herbal, alternative or no) work, quality experiments are necessary.
Why not just go to the source here and listen to someone who tried a treatment? I had a cold. I ate ice cream. The cold got better. Does that mean colds cure ice cream? If I’d thought my Turtle Sundae was going to cure the cold going in, I might be convinced of it, and proclaim it loudly to all comers.
I have cold. I eat ice cream. Cold goes away. YAY! Ice cream cures colds! Right?
There are several reasons why an individual taking a treatment might improve. Many things get better on their own, and the treatment is coincidental. The placebo effect is not only real, but far more significant than most people realize. People often change more than one thing at a time (such as changing their diets when they don’t feel well as well as starting a treatment) and the improvement might be due to the other change. And, of course, the treatment might have worked.
How can the real reason be sorted out? Good experimental design. That means using large sample sizes to reduce the effect of coincidences. Control groups are vital for sorting out what effects are due to the treatment, and the control groups should be similar in every way to the experimental group except for the treatment itself. Double-blind designs assure neither the patient nor their caretakers know if they’re getting the real thing or something that just seems real, to eliminate the placebo effect (and nocibo effects, where people wrongly attribute a negative side effect to a treatment). Statistical analysis removes investigator bias from the decision of how big a difference it takes before an effect is meaningful.
How to find the good information on medical treatments
I spend a lot of time reading medical literature; some of it as background for my posts here at 3BY. I do that because I’m not personally expert in a lot of the things I think preppers should know about, but I do have enough skill at finding, reading, and interpreting the literature to find some evidence to talk share. (When I can’t find such evidence, I generally just don’t write about the topic rather than waste your time with one more random person’s opinion.) .
Some journals are better than others. Pro tip: The ones with short names are often good ones. They’re old and stuck around because they were well-respected; I guess good names got taken early.
You can often find some of the references I used on my topics at the ends of the posts. You can also find your own, for whatever topics you are interested in. Admittedly the professional literature … well, it’s not the easiest or most fun reading ever; but if you know what you’re looking for it’s doable.
Start with a good university library’s search tools if you can. They tend to include good sources that are not free (the library buys the subscription) and pass on the large number of ‘looks legit but are really compost’ internet journals. If you don’t have access to that, Google Scholar is pretty good too, in that it has many good sources but does not filter out the look-alikes.
The gold standard of research articles are primary sources. These are written by the people who did they experiment. They describe exactly what they did, show you what they found, then tell you what they think it means. Review articles that draw a summary from a large number of primary sources are very helpful (so long as they tell you where all the information came from). Make sure the big sample sizes, good controls, double-blinded, etc. features are part of the experimental designs.
What if there isn’t high quality research?
This is a problem especially with inexpensive solutions and alternative remedies. Good research is expensive to do, and one of the main funders (pharma companies) are uninterested in doing it. That means research on those topics is thin, or even absent.
A good guide
A good guide here is the ever-valuable confirmation. Just one person explaining how to build a raised bed garden or whatever can be enough; but for complex things like sorting out medical treatment effects, having more sources raises your confidence (and reduces the effect of the occasional over-enthusiast or liar). It helps if all these sources are people who’ve been there, done that.
I use all these tips when I look for information on the topics I write here, and I hope you’ll do the same. By all means make your own decisions! I just hope you’ll base those decisions on a solid foundation of good evidence.
By the way: Here at 3BY, we do our best to walk the walk. We have no financial interest in anything we talk about (nobody pays us anything or provides us product, and we don’t get money from getting people to come here and click on things). We review only things we’ve tried and talk about things where we have some experience.
I am not a master gardener, but at least I’ve tried the things I talk about.
