At 12:09 this morning Earth reached the closest point to the sun in its orbit. I like to use this as my own personal marking of the start of the new year. Pleasantries aside though, today we'll be taking a look at yet the latest rigorous study to show absolutely zero effect on memory from Gingko Biloba.
I never understood the appeal of 'natural' medicines- an herb is a drug, but you have no idea the amount of the drug you are getting (it varies from plant to plant and even within different leaves on the same plant) when a pill made from the same active component, refined and separated, offers you a measured, exact dose with usage instructions. People live much longer, survive childbirth more frequently and recover from accidents and disease without debilitating results in numbers unheard of even a century ago, so the trend towards herbalism makes even less sense in that light. But even with that known, proponents cling to small, poorly designed studies that show threshold effects no higher then statistical noise to justify a frequently dangerous regimen of supposedly 'natural' remedies. The larger the study, and the more rigorous the design, the more the results mirror placebo rates. Not that these sort of things ever change the minds of the true believers, but a study encompassing more participants then all previous Gingko studies combined came up, surprise surprise, negative:
"It just continues to show that in properly designed, placebo-controlled studies, we can't seem to find an effect for ginkgo biloba," says Lon Schneider, an Alzheimer's and gerontology expert at the University of Southern California. The size of this study is larger than all previous ginkgo biloba studies combined, he says.
Phil Plait comments on the most absurd part of this coming from the altmed community, that scientists are somehow cheerful this is the outcome. We knew it was the outcome, we knew it was a waste of time, but if the results had come to show some previously unknown effect, doctors would have been ECSTATIC:
That doesn’t mean we in the reality-based world want these tests to fail. My favorite part in the article is this:
The study finding is “disappointing news,” says Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the study’s senior author. The only positive thing the researchers found is that ginkgo appears to be safe, he says.
DeKosky is dean of a prestigious medical school, and says he’s disappointed. Of course he is. Despite what a lot of the alt-medders (and antivaxxers) say, doctors really do want what’s best for their patients. If ginkgo had panned out, then that would be another weapon in doctors’ arsenals to make us healthier, and make us healthier for longer in our lives. But it didn’t work, so he was disappointed.
Those of us skeptical of these alternatives to modern medicine don’t want these things to fail. We already know that some mainstream medicines are based on what could once have been called herbal medicines — aspirin is the obvious example, originally made from willow bark — so we know better than to dismiss these potential additions to medicine out of hand.
What we do dismiss are anecdotes provided as evidence, or used to make claims that aren’t warranted from the evidence. All those anecdotes are is a place to start investigating the evidence for a potential medicine, not evidence in and of themselves.
That is the plus side of this study, no adverse effects were noted with the Gingko. If you have an elderly parent clinging to the belief that Gingko Biloba is somehow staving off the potential onset of Alzheimer's and they're too involved in the herbalism scam to introduce them to reality, you can at least know they aren't killing themselves quicker with it like many, many others.
USA Today roundup of the study, includes a Journal link.
Happy Sunday everybody, and Happy Perihelion!