Echinacea - it's not all the same stuff

In my last post I talked briefly about enhancing wellness during the changing and changeable autumn. One of my personal faves for preventing colds and flu is echinacea. It's funny but there are a lot of misconceptions about echinacea, the most common one being that it loses its efficacy after you take it for a few days. I used to believe that too, until Dr. Michael Dobbins, an extremely bright and funny guy from the San Francisco Bay area (Oakland, I think) set me straight.
That fallacy is based on a mistranslation of a German study. The subjects in the study took echinacea for five days and it proved to be helpful, but when it got translated, it was interpreted that it was only effective for five days. Not so! You can take it for as long as you like, and you can take it prophylactically, that is, as a preventative, before you ever even feel sick. (If you want more details, or want to check out the studies that have been done on echinacea, an herbalist named Robyn Klein has written an excellent, easily understood article  that you can find on echinacea myths.)

I've taken echinacea for years at the first sign of a sniffle, or even without a sniffle if I've been exposed to someone with a cold, and had great results. But there is trick to getting good results, and that is by buying echinacea that has been processed in a country that has pharmaceutical standards for herbs. In the US, you can pretty much put anything in a bottle, label it echinacea (this goes for any herb) and sell it. The European Economic Community has established standardized guidelines for herbs, and herbal products from Germany are typically high quality, but mine come from Medi-Herb in Australia. I like the stuff that is in liquid form, in an alcohol base, because it goes right to work. Well, I don't actually like it, as it's about the nastiest tasting stuff you can imagine, but it works. It's worth the extra effort and slightly higher cost to hunt down herbs that have been produced with pharmaceutical standards - and really easy to do on line.