> Most modern scientific experimentation has failed to demonstrate any lasting medicinal potency in the fungus,
Lasting is a weird weasel word here. Cordyceps are well studied, and they do have acute effects that have been measured in many studies. They increase athletic endurance and are stimulating.
Is the author minimizing the effects to try to prevent the ecological effects of over harvesting?
Most cordyceps supplements today contain cordyceps militaris spawned on grain. Sinensis is sometimes claimed to be more potent than easier-to-cultivate militaris - I wouldnt be surprised if the romanticism of the "wild and rare" version is overblown, but the claim that it doesn't have demonstrable potency seems implausible and strange.
My dad believes that garlic is the best antibiotic, so he eats a lot whenever he gets sick (he doesn't care if it's a viral infection, because garlic conveniently also boosts the immune system).
Thank goodness garlic is cheap and easily available, and he doesn't fund some bizarre economy by buying rare, weird-looking foodstuffs with purported magical properties.
Garlic definitely helps with preventing the spread of infection, because if you eat enough garlic, people will automatically stay at a safe distance from you.
Both Garlic and Olive Leaf are two very effective natural antibiotics. It doesn't take a lot of faith or woo to realize that they are actually quite effective medicine.
The Cochrane review is weird. It's a meta analysis that excluded all studies but one - which did find an effect:
"This trial randomly assigned 146 participants to either an allicin‐containing garlic capsule (dose unspecified) or a placebo (once daily) for 12 weeks. The trial reported 24 occurrences of the common cold in the garlic intervention group compared with 65 in the placebo group (P < 0.001), resulting in fewer days of illness in the garlic group compared with the placebo group (111 versus 366). The number of days to recovery from an occurrence of the common cold was similar in both groups (4.63 versus 5.63)."
> There is insufficient clinical trial evidence regarding the effects of garlic in preventing or treating the common cold. A single trial suggested that garlic may prevent occurrences of the common cold but more studies are needed to validate this finding. Claims of effectiveness appear to rely largely on poor‐quality evidence.
If garlic is so obviously effective as the other commenter claims then there should be plenty of supporting evidence, it's not that hard or expensive to test for it, yet, this meta-analysis could only find a single good quality study that showed some effect. This is called chance.
XKCD on significance (p-value): Green jelly beans linked to acne! https://xkcd.com/882/
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But there is only an absence if you choose to throw out the hundreds of "not good enough" studies indicating effects in the same direction.
There is a weird contrarianism a lot of people seem to relish in when it comes to natural medicine having an effect.
The reason pharmaceuticals have studies that prove effects is because there is a giant profit engine powering them and a regulatory system requiring it. It's hard and expensive to do a huge well controlled study of garlic because most modern people eat garlic as a regular part of their diet. It would be hard to find statistically significant effects for prozac if the control group used it as a seasoning.
> It's hard and expensive to do a huge well controlled study of garlic because most modern people eat garlic as a regular part of their diet. It would be hard to find statistically significant effects for prozac if the control group used it as a seasoning.
If everybody already takes this "medicine" then what's the problem? We are saved! Or... Wait a minute! How come common cold is still common?!
Also, if this were true it'd be like saying air saves us from suffocating. Well, duh.
> If garlic is so obviously effective as the other commenter claims then there should be plenty of supporting evidence, it's not that hard or expensive to test for it, yet, this meta-analysis could only find a single good quality study that showed some effect.
This line of reasoning is fraught with pitfalls. An inferred absence of True Scotsmen to use in an argument by authority doesn't prove a negative. Add that to the fact that there's a selection bias in favor of studies that appear to disprove commonly held beliefs (and generally almost no interest in studies that confirm them) and you really have to use more judgement if you're trying to get at the truth and not just win the argument.
The first Cochrane "review" only looks at a single study which uses Allicin powder at 180mg not whole garlic:
> In this updated review, we identified eight trials as potentially relevant from our searches. Again, only one trial met the inclusion criteria
The second link is not specific to garlic and the part where garlic is briefly mentioned cites the original review and the same, single, study.
The review's conclusion is, imo, valid. It's that *there is not enough evidence to say there's an effect*. Your comment, and the way people tend to utilize these reviews, clearly conflates the concept of "not enough evidence" with "evidence against".
> Your comment, and the way people tend to utilize these reviews, clearly conflates the concept of "not enough evidence" with "evidence against".
When there's plenty of opportunity to search for and find evidence, and multiple researchers do try, and repeatedly fail to find evidence (or they have mild "success" every one try out of ten, by pure luck, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging), that strongly suggests that there's no real effect.
Especially when you know that these people don't only do this with garlic, but with every single piece of spice, herb and other plant material you can imagine. Yes, some of them are effective; contrary to what many people believe (and you can read this in this thread, too), most, if not all our medicine is of "natural" (plant or animal) origin. Yet, at the same time, most "natural" stuff is not medicine. Why cling to the ones we can't prove effective however we try, when there are many more candidates?
> When there's plenty of opportunity to search for and find evidence, and multiple researchers do try, and repeatedly fail to find evidence (or they have mild "success" every one try out of ten, by pure luck
You're doing it too! Again, this review looked at a SINGLE study. They discounted other studies. Those other studies were not taken into account at all. Those other studies didn't "fail to find evidence"
No, they did review them, but you didn't read the article. The excluded studies were either investigated something else, not common cold, or were so bad that they failed right away. They still gave short summaries of them, and gave the reasons for exclusion:
> Andrianova 2003: The definition of ARD included influenza, thus excluding it from our review.
> Rafinski 1974: We excluded this study because there was no comparison group and it was a non‐randomised controlled trial.
> Ushirotake 2004: As the study was not randomised or blinded, there is a high risk of bias.
> Hiltunen 2007: This study did not meet this criterion as the cellulose could not be considered a standard treatment or a placebo.
[...]
I won't copy all of them, please go and read it yourself!
If it's not a randomized, controlled, blinded trial then it's not a trial to be considered any further, their results are unreliable.
I have indeed read the review. I think there's some confusion here.
Your comment: When there's plenty of opportunity to search for and find evidence, and multiple researchers do try, and repeatedly fail to find evidence
The review: *Explicitly discluded all but one study.
Here's the other thing. The ONE study they DID include did actually find a positive effect:
> Key results
> The included study found that people who took garlic every day for three months (instead of a placebo) had fewer colds. That is, over the three‐month period, there were 24 occurrences of the common cold in the garlic group, compared to 65 in the placebo group. When participants experienced a cold, the length of illness was similar in both groups (4.63 versus 5.63 days).
The reason the analysis concluded that there's "not enough evidence" is simply because there was not more than a single study they deemed valid based on methodology. The thing is that even those discluded studies found a positive effect. In fact, all evidence points to a positive effect. The review is literally just saying there's not enough high quality evidence
Comments like yours confound "not enough evidence" for "evidence against". That's all I'm pointing out
And no smoking while you're at it. That DHMO has got hydrogen in it which is dangerously flammable. And monoxide is poisonous. I learnt that at school.
The (purported) effective compounds in garlic are organosulfur compounds which are actually *in vitro* shown to have antiviral activity. Obviously whether that translate to "in vivo" is much harder to study
> I, too, grew up in this part of the world—my hometown in the Sichuan lowland was only a day’s drive away. But I was naive enough to think that training on an elliptical machine was adequate preparation to hunt caterpillar fungus in person
Yeah hiking up in those mountains really sneaks up on you. I work in agriculture scouting fields and so I’m reasonably capable of all day long activity in adverse conditions carrying light equipment.
I started off full throttle “it’s just normal walking on gravel except up a bit”, only to find there’s an invisible wall you cross passing a certain elevation where suddenly exhaustion hits and taking single steps is a big drain. It was actually kind of funny. It’s the kind of sudden exhaustion you get when trying to walk over grown soybeans, but with nothing in the way.
Paul Stamets on Joe Rogan (crazy stuff, apolitical topics are all I can stand, then only barely...) mentioned that Cordyceps sinensis seems to have different fruiting forms, and in the wild it often grows with another fungi so you get very different expression.
I'm not a TCM believer, but dispassionate studies Stamets mentioned also have shown that growing some fungi on grain vs. hardwood causes large swings in the production of some compounds by the mycelium. "You are what you eat" applies to plenty of things, and I think there's just a huge bias we have that 'some dumb white fuzz' can't have all this hidden complexity.
This is a fantastic piece, and is written so well! I wish more could be done to educate folks along the way. Imagine 1/10th of a country's GDP depending on the fungi, and it's not just hard to source, but its efficacy on certain aspects is questionable.
Right? Humanity comes up with some wild industries.
From the wiki it sounds like it is often also full of toxic metals:
> the fruiting bodies harvested in nature usually contain high amounts of arsenic and other heavy metals, so they are potentially toxic and sales have been strictly regulated by China's State Administration for Market Regulation since 2016.
What an engagingly-written and interesting piece. I really enjoyed the glimpse into the lives of ordinary people somewhere where I may never get the opportunity to travel to.
This article is worth reading start to finish. It's about more than fungus, it's about how a scientist can try to impact society and the limitations of it.
Market price of caterpillar fungus equates to a full tenth of Tibet’s gross domestic product—more than its mining and other industrial sectors combined.
And this is the first I've heard of it.
This is potentially economically devastating. And I have no idea how to feel about the actual practice, though I'm taken aback at the idea of trying to intentionally parasitize live caterpillars in order to domesticate the product.
They sell supplements containing Cordyceps pretty much everywhere. I have some in my fridge (chocolate-flavoured), it's supposed to be an immune system booster.
Totally aside from the point of the article I noticed he used the phrase "I played Cassandra". Can anyone tell me what this means? Searching brings up nothing.
The phrase has been presumably used with the meaning of having predicted that something bad will happen in the future, despite everybody else believing otherwise.
Lasting is a weird weasel word here. Cordyceps are well studied, and they do have acute effects that have been measured in many studies. They increase athletic endurance and are stimulating.
Is the author minimizing the effects to try to prevent the ecological effects of over harvesting?
Most cordyceps supplements today contain cordyceps militaris spawned on grain. Sinensis is sometimes claimed to be more potent than easier-to-cultivate militaris - I wouldnt be surprised if the romanticism of the "wild and rare" version is overblown, but the claim that it doesn't have demonstrable potency seems implausible and strange.