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Ginkgo Doesn't Improve Memory Or Cognitive Skills
JumperCable writes "Ginkgo biloba has failed — again — to live up to its reputation for boosting memory and brain function. Just over a year after a study showed that the herb doesn't prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease, a new study from the same team of researchers has found no evidence that ginkgo reduces the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging. In the new study, the largest of its kind to date, DeKosky and his colleagues followed more than 3,000 people between the ages of 72 and 96 for an average of six years. Half of the participants took two 120-milligram capsules of ginkgo a day during the study period, and the other half took a placebo. The people who took ginkgo showed no differences in attention, memory, and other cognitive measures compared to those who took the placebo, according to the study, which was published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association."
These euro-centric "scientists" can't see pas their narrow-minded blinders to tap into the millenia of cultural experience embodied in Eastern medical and spiritual traditions. The point is, Gingko Baloba has a very potent effect when added to the labels of alternative medical products, causing them to fly off the shelves in exchange for cash. Western medicine is just jealous and probably racist and sexist against peoples like me.
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Yes but was it ORGANIC Kinkgo?? That is the question! This test was obviously conducted by real doctors who don't want us to know the truth about the power of eating weeds that grow in exotic jungles.
Holy shit, that's a lot of placebo.
But just wait until I convince everyone to eat my lawn. I'll be rich!
Oh wait ... http://www.hollandandbarrett.com/pages/product_detail.asp?pid=138
I bet the herbal supplements industry is hoping its customers will forget all about this report eventually... :)
Aspirin or Ginko?
http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/ginkgo-biloba-000247.htm
Better concentration (some subjects thinking that that is one of the memory functions) could be a side effect of them not having headaches due to hypertension. Sample set yadi yada and so on.... statistics and damned lies.
Or perhaps it's best put, wonders often never materialize in the first place. Is anyone really surprised that something sold with a big "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA" on the bottle has, in fact, been found to do nothing close to the claim?
Hopefully herbal viagra is next, and some day spammers will be emailing about things people actually can use...*
*(warning the claims in this post have not been evaluated by the FDA)
Smoke and coffee.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The same thing that the color black is good for. Selling stuff to people.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The "These claims have not been evaluated by the FDA" and its close friend "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease." are generally a signal that the product is sold as a "dietary supplement" or "nutritional supplement".
Thanks to DSHEA, the FDA legally can't do jack about it unless they have direct evidence of a given product causing serious harm(and their budget for going on epidemiological expeditions for that sort of thing isn't much to write home about).
Whether you consider this a shining beacon of freedom, or an ignoble nest of quacks, it seems likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
You know what they call alternative medicine that works?.... Medicine.
Cue the "but it worked in my case" replies...
Ginkgo Balboa is clinically proven to improve your boxing skills...
"Our bear makes other people more beautiful to you"
Is that a Care Bear, or what kind of bear, exactly?
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Made me lol @work. Wish I had mod points. :)
the ginkgo tree itself is pretty amazing: its the coelacanth of trees
known only from the ancient fossil record, having aspects of a missing link between major plant classifications, and with no other living relatives by a long shot (at least from the perspective of western science). until isolated specimens were located, to western expert's amazed awe, in 1690. it was cultivated in the east, and this probably led to its survival, since the only populations anyone can consider wild are only in a tiny mountain reserve in eastern china... but even this group of trees might only exist because it was tended by monks for millenia, ironically for this story, probably because of medicinal value
in other words, the coelacanth of trees may only continue to exist in this world due to the efforts of ancient man, the inverse relationship between extinction and mankind. either way, if you've ever looked at a ginkgo leaf, you can readily appreciate how ancient and alien the plant is. its like a tiny fan, a completely unique morphology unlike any other leaf you have ever seen on any other plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo_biloba
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not to say the results of this particular study are necessarily bogus, but sure makes one wonder.
Big pharma dislikes "natural", as in often unpatentable, treatments; discourages their use.
Ron
Never mind then that Vitamin C (arguably an 'unrefined plant material') has the odd effect of making you *not get scurvy and die* as a result of a daily dosage of around 100mg.
Relatively small doses of simple things can affect you in lots of interesting ways. Look at medication that treats thyroid disorders; it's a simple material (although it doesn't grow on trees) dosed out in *micrograms*, the slightest variation of which (less than 15 micrograms for some people, myself included) your body WILL feel the difference of.
Most things, sure, your body sends in one end and it comes out the other relatively unchanged. Certain things, though, are profoundly influential.
That sounds racist to me.
Herbal supplement's are not concentrated like pharmaceuticals are.... 120 mg a day won't get you anything. Take 120 mg a day of most herbs that have active drug compounds and you're likely to get no more than a trace of that drug, whereas pharmaceuticals take the active compound and synthesize it - then give you 120 mg of the concentrated compound.
As a laugh, you could take 120 mg of marijuana - even good stuff... and smoke it. That's maybe 1/4 of a joint (you'd get about 2 joints out of a gram of weed if you were conservative). How high are you going to get on 1/4 of a joint? Not very... and THC is a fairly potent compound. Gingko is not nearly as potent.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Interestingly, Zicam snuck in under a different loophole. Zicam was 10% Zinc Gluconate, which turns out to be pretty bloody high for intranasal use(check out what it did in animal tests). However, since Zinc Gluconate is one of the substances included in the "Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States" (a collection of homeopathic "remedies" put together according to this procedure) and since 10% is equivalent to the "1D" homeopathic dilution, Zicam could be regulated and sold as a homeopathic drug rather than a conventional drug.
Unlike "dietary supplements", homeopathic remedies are recognized as drugs under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act(in Section 201(g). However, unlike ordinary drugs, they are subject only to production and labeling standards, not safety or efficacy tests, and are almost always nonprescription. Normally, this isn't a big deal, because most homeopathic drugs are so diluted that the contain(on average) 0 molecules of the active ingredient, and are prepared using harmless dilutants. Zicam was unusual in that, while it arguably fell under the definition of "homeopathic", and was sold as such, it was well within the range for biological activity.
Ginkgo Balboa is clinically proven to improve your boxing skills...
And Ginko Bilboa is clinically proven to get you there and back again.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
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As somebody else above has said, plant extracts are not a concentrated source of anything. Which means you're probably better off comparing the effects of 120mg of freshly squeezed orange juice on scurvy than 100mg of vitamin C.
No doubt, you are correct. Very small dosages of certain vitamins and minerals can affect the body greatly. But very small dosages of naturally-occurring, unpurified, untreated, otherwise minimally processed things probably don't.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
What herbal remedies do you recommend?
My drug recommendations all come with the serious urging that you research deeply on your own. That includes my recommendations for plant-derived or synthetic, brand-name drugs. Do you think gobbling down Tagamet and aspirin, just because you can buy them off the drug store shelf, without an understanding of drug metabolization is a good idea?
For difficulty sleeping or resetting a sleep schedule, for antioxidant effect, plant-derived melatonin. As such a fundamental neurochemical, you'll want to be careful about your usage. A specific effect to be wary of is immunomodulation.
Kavalactones present in the Kava plant are anxiolytics — they have anti-anxiety effects. They work on GABA receptors, similarly to alcohol, but don't have the same stupefying effects. If using the raw plant, do not take leaves and stems, only the root, macerated in water, per the traditional use. As with all drugs, take in moderation.
For mental stimulation and performance, caffeine from green tea (or coffee). Also theobromine from cacao. Also cinnamon scent (go ahead, look it up). And again Kava. Flaxseed meal (alpha-linolenic acid, which converts to EPA and DHA — omega-3s), walnuts, etc.
For bronchodilation, theophylline from cacao.
For anti-emetic (nausea/vomiting, including motion sickness), ginger (active ingredient zingiberene). Perhaps marijuana.
For mood, theobromine from cacao, kavalactones from Kava, plant-derived melatonin, caffeine. Plant-derived 5-HTP (beware interactions with MAOIs and SSRIs). I'd suggest looking into St. John's Wort, but I haven't delved deeply into it myself except to note that it's a drug metabolization inhibitor, and so requires special care regarding interaction. The first thing to do with poor mood is not to begin applying drugs anyway, plant-based or synthetic.
For energy level, caffeine from green tea or elsewhere, theobromine (cacao), cocaine (coca).
For anti-inflammation, depending on severity, curcumin (turmeric), eugenol (cloves), and zingiberene (ginger), bromelain (pineapple), papain (papaya), alpha-linolenic acid (flaxseeds), cinnamon. Maybe
For digestion, ginger, pineapple, papaya.
Surely that's a big enough list that you can find something wrong in it. I know you're looking for chinks in armor.
Why do you believe that these remedies are effective?
Reading. Broad-spectrum data factoring (e.g., including absence of certain kinds of information) anchored mostly by published studies (with an appropriate eye towards credibility). You? (Seriously. How do you know about your own choices?)
How do these remedies compare to the drugs that target the same complaints in both cost and effectiveness?
Well, gee, which ones? How about the anti-inflammatories... NSAIDs have an issue with promoting GI irritation and stomach bleeding. If you've got ulcers already, IBD or Crohn's or Coeliac Disease, NSAIDs will be pretty hard on you. On the other hand, the degree of inflammation present in autoimmune disorders is probably not the right scenario for trying to address solely with eugenol/zingiberene/curcumin. But back on the gripping hand, adding these to your diet can only help.
Side-effects and come-down from SSRIs are pretty gnarly, especially in the suicide cases. Make sure not to miss your doses.
Green tea can be pretty expensive, I admit. But, whatever. Ginger, turmeric, cloves... not that expensive and serve dual purpose as freakin' spices. Kava's pretty pricey, I have to say, but I quite like it. If anyone knows a good source of quality root, please chime in. I expect whole root to be less expensive than capsule or tincture preparations.
What qualifies you to be making medicinal recommendations to others? Do you have relevant training?
Do you have the relevant training as a consumer