Word: wort
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Shelton, however, stood his ground. He organized the study after seriously depressed patients, who had taken St. John's wort but hadn't been helped by it, began turning up en masse at his office. Learning that other psychiatrists were encountering a similar influx, he recruited doctors at nearly a dozen medical centers to join him in a clinical trial of the effectiveness of St. John's wort in combatting depression. With unrestricted funding from Pfizer, which makes both the prescription antidepressant Zoloft and an extract of St. John's wort, the doctors recruited 200 subjects, nearly two-thirds...
Blindly assigned to one of two groups, they were given either a placebo or St. John's wort. The initial dose: three standard 300-mg tablets a day, which was upped to four tablets if there was no improvement after four weeks. Although the St. John's wort group showed slightly more improvement than the placebo group (27% v. 19%) at the end of the eight-week trial, the doctors regarded the difference as statistically insignificant. When taking prescription antidepressants, two-thirds of patients improve...
...final word. That could come before the end of the year when the National Institutes of Health completes a larger, three-year study that will meet one of the criticisms of the Vanderbilt trial. Instead of simply dividing patients into two groups--one on St. John's wort, the other on a placebo--the NIH study has a third group taking a prescription antidepressant. What should people who are using St. John's wort or thinking about it do until then? "Hold off," says Shelton, and consider one of the nearly two dozen prescription medications whose effectiveness has been proved...
...less surprised by the news about St. John's wort than Stephen Barrett, 67, a retired Allentown, Pa., psychiatrist who for nearly 30 years has made it his business to sniff out health-related frauds, fads, myths and fallacies. Through newsletters, books and now the World Wide Web, he has become one of America's premier debunkers of what he likes to call quackery...
Barrett long ago wrote off St. John's wort as a treatment for severe depression, posting a dispassionate analysis of the evidence for and against it on his website, www.quackwatch.com alongside similar dismissals of such nostrums as bee pollen, royal jelly and "stabilized oxygen." His site--filled with useful links, cautionary notes and essays on treatments ranging from aromatherapy to wild-yam cream--is widely cited by doctors and medical writers and draws 100,000 hits a month. It has also made Barrett a lightning rod for herbalists, homeopaths and assorted true believers, who regularly vilify him as dishonest, incompetent...