Herbal Medicine Skepticism

[WaldoMcFroog]

My wife has bought some powders for our baby's teething pain. They're herbal, containing 'tincture of Matricaria 0.002ml in a lactose base' and I was interested to read that they can be administered "every one, two or three hours if necessary, until improvement" (although admittedly it does go onto to say if symptoms persist after five days to consult a doctor).

To my mind, if you can repeat a medicine's dosage every hour for five days, there probably isn't much going on there. Do you think I'm right to have my skeptic's alarm going off over the dosage instructions?

There is widespread anecdotal evidence of this reapportion's efficacy, but that doesn't necessarily prove anything.

[tompaine]

Hi Waldo

The dose (0.002 ml) is so small that it probably can't do any harm. In fact, It is highly unlikely that such a small dose will have any effect at all but never underestimate the power of placebo on both you and your child. There are mixed findings that chamomile has medicinal qualities at larger doses which are not recommended for children but research is thin on the ground and mixed at best. See the link for a full description on research/doses etc:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/na tural/patient-chamomile.html

[WaldoMcFroog]

That was exactly what I was thinking - if there were anything significant in there you wouldn't be allowed to repeated adminsiter it.

I'm not totally against herbal medicine, but this sounded more like homeopathy, which is total arsewater.