allergens

Complementary Medicine May Have Scant Effect in Asthma

Sometimes I’m not sure if we’ll ever “get it.” When it comes to using natural medicine to address a chronic disease, we are not looking for one magic bullet to solve everything. This is how the pharmaceutical companies think. Instead, the patient with asthma would eliminate intake of common allergens (milk, corn, wheat…), load up on probiotics, manipulation, exercise, make sure living space is clean and as dust free as possible, high dose Vit C to prevent release of histamine from mast cells, and several natural anti-inflammatories to boot. Of course this study does not show a benefit of individual complementary medicine!! How ’bout doing a study with all of these interventions compared to standard pharmaceutical intervention??

Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol 2000;85:438-449 There is little evidence that complementary or alternative medicine is useful in asthma treatment, according to a review of the subject. Drs. Donna Melissa Graham and Michael S. Blaiss of the University of Tennessee, Memphis, note that “complementary/alternative medicine is commonly used by patients with chronic conditions including asthma.” Despite the lack of supporting evidence, they add, one third of the US population has tried such remedies. The researchers reviewed the literature covering a wide range of therapies, including traditional Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, aromatherapy, chiropractic manipulation and reflexology. The study was supported by an unrestricted grant from Astra Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. However, they came across few well-controlled studies that supported the efficacy of such approaches for asthma or atopic disorders. Among significant design flaws often encountered, were “insufficient numbers of patients, lack of proper controls, and inadequate blinding.” In addition, “subject groups are often not well characterized in regard to asthma severity and use of conventional medications.” The team found some indications for which “certain herbal therapies…could possibly be helpful in the treatment of allergic diseases.” Nevertheless, they conclude that “available scientific evidence does not support a role for complementary/alternative medicine in the treatment of asthma.”