Alternative Medicine Herbal Medicine

Echinacea: Friend or Foe?

When you begin to get that dreaded feeling of an oncoming cold, you may reach for the echinacea tea or capsules. But is this popular herb doing more harm than good?

Echinacea is a family of plants considered to have some antibiotic properties. Some believe that the extract of this plant stimulates the immune system to fight off infections, like the common cold, before they have a chance to cause too many symptoms.

In the lab, some of these claims have proven true, as have the extracts from many different plants to show some antimicrobial properties. However, few studies looked at the impact of echinacea on the body.

Therefore, researchers from the University of Arkansas followed 15 healthy adults as they took the supplement Echinacea pupurea, one common variety of this plant, for 10 days. During the study, the researchers collected stool specimens from the study participants before taking the supplement, after the 10 days of use and seven days after stopping treatment.

While the participants reported only minor side effects from taking echinacea, the researchers found that the amount of bacteria in the stool samples increased while the patients were taking the supplements. This suggests that the amount of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract increased while the patients took these supplements.

While bacteria are supposed to be found in the gut, some types of bacteria can be potentially dangerous. In fact, one particular type of bacteria, Bacteroides fragilis, a known pathogen, was found in increased numbers in the participants’ stool samples. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics.

Study author, Jerald Foote, notes that the bacteria B. fragilis has been found in high concentrations in patients at high risk for colon cancer and one strain of this bacteria may contribute to inflammatory bowel disease and diarrhea.

More work needs to be done to firmly link echinacea use to dangerous gut bacteria, but as a result of his findings, Foote suggests that people limit their use of echinacea.