Treatments That Work, or Don’t

and where to find out . . .

In the USA , effective drugs - both prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) products – are approved by the FDA for specific conditions.  Of course, doctors may prescribe some drugs for other conditions, too, but such use hasn’t usually been confirmed by good clinical trials.  You can find out about effective drugs at: FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Non-drug treatments that work are harder to research.  One way is to go to the FDA’s Home Page and enter the treatment or device into the search box at the top left of the page.  Supplements (vitamins, minerals, herbs, and so on) often claim effectiveness in their advertisements, but they haven’t been scrutinized by the FDA, and care is often needed. You can look at HealthandAge’s Alternative Medicine pages to read about individual supplements.

How about treatments that may not work, or are known to be ineffective and/or dangerous?  When in doubt, you should go to Quackwatch, an excellent website run by Dr Stephen Barrett.  It collects the known information about treatments that are obviously fraudulent, together with illuminating accounts of the people who are pushing them.

It takes quite a long time to establish the safety and effectiveness of treatments that are widely promoted as ‘miracle cures’ for common conditions. Just recently, echinacea for the common cold and ginkgo for memory improvement have been found to have no evidence of clinical effectiveness, although consumers have been taking them for years for these purposes.  Caveat emptor!