- slightly improved BPH symptoms measured with the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) at follow-ups of up to 12 months (standardized mean difference [SMD] -2.06, 95% confidence intervals [CI] [-3.22, -0.91] very low certainty evidence, 6 studies),
- reduced prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels (mean difference [MD] -0.37 ng/ml, 95% CI [-0.50, -0.23] low certainty evidence, 4 studies)
- had little effect on quality of life (SMD -0.59, 95% CI [-1.57, 0.38] very low certainty evidence, 2 studies).
The main reasons for downgrading the evidence were study limitations (studies judged to be at an unclear or high risk of bias), inconsistency (considerable heterogeneity), and imprecision (small effect sizes and wide confidence intervals around effect estimates). All six studies reported no adverse-effects.
- positive but not truly honest about the limitations of the evidence (we see this regularly on my blog);
- or they are sufficiently critical and thus arrive, like our above paper, at unequivocal (and sadly not very helpul) conclusions.
As this is so, we see very few SRs that conclude “there is sound evidence to show that SCAM xy is effective (or ineffective)”. Yet, such verdicts would be what consumers need.
The cause of the first scenario (false-positive conclusion) is that reviewers are biased and want to demonstrate that SCAM works. Such authors behave unethically, in my view, because they mislead the public and might cause untold harm. The cause of the second scenario (unequivocal conclusion) is the poor quality of the primary studies. This phenomenon too is mostly due to over-enthusiastic researchers who want to prove their SCAM instead of testing it. Conducting a clinical trial is far from easy or cheap. It is beyond me, why so many SCAM trialists do not try their best to do it well!
If you think of it, the most likely reason is that they are not really interested in finding the truth but mainly want to promote their agenda. If you don’t believe me, have a look at my ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE HALL OF FAME and the amazing men and women in it.
It is time, I think, that SCAM researcher learn the most basic principle of their profession: science is not a game where you set out to confirm what you believe. Science works by
- formulating a hypothesis,
- doing your very best to prove your hypothesis wrong,
- only if it cannot be proven wrong, assuming that it probably is correct.
To put it bluntly: investigators who use science to prove their point are not scientists but pseudo-scientists, and sadly SCAM has more than its fair share of such charlatans (drunken men using a lamp-post for support rather than enlightenment!). To put it even more bluntly: to prevent serious harm – because that sort of thing does a lot of real harm! – researchers who repeatedly show themselves to be incapable of doing unbiased science (again, see my ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE HALL OF FAME), should be banned from doing research.
12 Responses to Our review of ‘Urtica Dioica’ for benign prostatic hyperplasia … (and a rant about poor SCAM research)
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I’m interested in stinging nettle for it’s potential in syndromes like GWI and FMS
The neuroinflammation researcher Jarred Younger from UAB tested it a few years ago on GWI
was dose dependent and significant mostly for pain
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8037868/
He has a great YT channel and here’s a video about this research
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgvxljIy_j0
[my emphasis]
I agree, I’m interested in the potential and would like to see more research on the matter, not considering it a cure or a recommendation at the moment.
There is an ongoing larger following trial with a higher dose as well.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05377242
Oh for goodness’ sake, not another trial of curcumin! Try at least to use the search box on this website before you compose your comments.
Here’s the three pages of result when searching for the word curcumin:
https://edzardernst.com/?s=curcumin
Here’s just one of Edzard’s 21 articles:
Curcumin: a case study of large-scale research fraud
Published Saturday 03 February 2024
Please read it, especially this important reference to Nelson et al. 2017.
Nelson KM, Dahlin JL, Bisson J, Graham J, Pauli GF, Walters MA.
The Essential Medicinal Chemistry of Curcumin.
Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 2017 Mar 9;60(5):1620–1637.
doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975.
Epub 2017 Jan 11.
PMID: 28074653; PMCID: PMC5346970.
[my emphasis]
This is a highly respected neuroinflammation pain and fatigue lab in UAB, not some shady lab financed by a supplement company to commit fraud for marketing
(those papers are funded by the DOD as it’s a veteran’s illness).
They’re also going to check resveratrol, which has even worse rep than curcumin in the realm of longevity, but showed some promise regarding neuroinflammation and symptoms in GWI and is worth pursuing in diagnosis related to microglia activation in a larger trial.
The curcumin follow up is based on this one, which came in 2021 and is placebo controlled and blinded:
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/5/2468
“No double-blinded, placebo controlled clinical trial of curcumin has been successful.”
The follow up will be much larger, also blinded and placebo controlled, let me know if you find specific flaws or fraud in his research and the current study design instead of attacking the issue as a whole.
What the hell is the purpose of your comments?
On Monday 03 February 2025 you asked:
“Can you please give your opinion on this paper and their claims regarding EHS? [link]”
https://edzardernst.com/2024/04/the-fake-diagnoses-of-so-called-alternative-medicine-part-2/#comment-154933
On Tuesday 11 February 2025 at 10:10, above, you linked to ‘researchers’ who don’t know whether or not stinging nettle is helpful for the treatment of GWI.🙄
Then you go on about yet more research into curcumin etc., which is yet to yield a result. In place of evidence, you have committed various logical fallacies, including appeal to authorities and shifting the burden of proof.
I particularly dislike people who support such things as channeling DoD funds into providing false hope to veterans[e.g. 𝟭, 𝟮]: I sincerely hope that you are not one of them. The content and style of your anonymous comments come across as being issued by someone who is hiding something.
𝟭. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/tag/veterans/
𝟮. Damn the evidence and regulations: VA goes full speed ahead with medical pseudoscience
The VA recently mandated inclusion of acupuncture, reiki, reflexology and other CAM in veterans medical benefits and will require that they be offered at VA medical facilities, ignoring the lack of evidence and federal rules on what medical benefits can be covered.
— Jann Bellamy, Science-Based Medicine, 2017‑12‑07
I am a veteran(not from the US), I don’t have GWI but I have ME/CFS and FMS(same UAB lab found microglial activation in all of those diagnoses).
I only talked about my interest in the potential of nettle for my diagnoses and didn’t claim anything like cure or effectiveness, with all its limitations the paper did show statistical significance for pain and was dose dependent, so what is the problem with my comment?
Nettle is the subject of this post and review so I found it relevant.
The researchers of nettle for GWI do think it has potential and this is why there is a much larger follow-up trial,
same with curcumin, and you brought curcumin up, it’s the same trial with 3 botanicals, I linked it about the nettle arm of the trial, I’m waiting for the results of the larger trial, not jumping into conclusions and not taking it myself for now, but it is sure relevant for my interest in nettle.
I did try curcumin a few years ago and it didn’t work for me personally, I accept that a lot of research on the matter is problematic, some are fraud and it’s very hard to standardize it.
I don’t think it’s ok to put the curcumin research from UAB in the same problematic category and just disregard it without checking the paper itself, this is biased, that is the relevancy of the burden of proof for finding flaws in this specific work.
My appeal to authority is regarding the post about the fraud in curcumin research you linked to show that the chance of fraud here is very small and not to prove anything else.
I asked about the EHS because of a family member that is sure he has it and tried to convince me I have it too, he sent me this paper and I was wondering if it could be easily disproven(EHS was one of the subjects of that post, the diagnosis is used to promote SCAM and I also consider it pseudoscience).
I’m against promoting unproven SCAM for all diagnoses and using benefits to cover them not only for veterans and am not promoting them myself, I got burned with a lot of SCAM over the years before sticking with a more science based approach.
Thank you for your reply, Aviv. I’ll do my best to address some of your points. I live in the UK therefore my terminology and descriptions will differ from yours. I’ve included hypertext in this reply for readers who are unfamiliar with the subject matter.
By “FMS” I assume you mean fibromyalgia. I’ve had many discussions over the years regarding people who’ve been diagnosed with both ME/CFS and fibromyalgia. My understanding is that each is a diagnosis by exclusion, therefore arriving at a diagnosis of one of them logically excludes having the other. There are, I think, too many clinicians who diagnose the patient as having both conditions (for reasons that go far beyond the scope of this discussion). I’ve mentioned this in response to your “I have ME/CFS and FMS (same UAB lab found microglial activation in all of those diagnoses)”.
I’m not sure what exactly you meant by “in all of those diagnoses”, but I find it interesting that (if by UAB lab you mean Neuroinflammation, Pain and Fatigue Laboratory – Department of Psychology, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
) they state
If you can’t (or won’t) see the obvious problem with that approach then I can’t explain it to you. As long as you are happy with their approach, and you don’t laud them in your comments, then my take on it is irrelevant to you. The same applies to the microglial activation they supposedly found in you. I’m not sure that microglial activation means what you think it means
Regarding “The researchers of nettle for GWI do think it has potential”. Almost everything that has not yet been sufficiently tested has potential. Poking someone in the eye with a sharp stick has potential. But what is of utmost importance clinically is the risk–benefit ratio and the cost–benefit ratio of a treatment. Neither of these nor the dose have been established. You will indeed have to wait for the results of the study to which you linked:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curcumin
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol
You wrote “I don’t think it’s ok to put the curcumin research from UAB in the same problematic category and just disregard it without checking the paper itself, this is biased, that is the relevancy of the burden of proof for finding flaws in this specific work.”
When garbage is fed into the finest research methods available then these methods will produce nothing other than garbage. Furthermore, I hope you are fully aware of the facts that:
1. a randomized clinical trial (RCT) cannot possibly establish whether or not a treatment works, it can only provide an estimate of the effect size found during the trial;
2. the quality of an unreplicated trial is irrelevant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility
Neither I nor anyone else here owns “the burden of proof for finding flaws in this specific work”, WHICH HASN’T EVEN BEEN COMPLETED, FFS!
You wrote “I asked about the EHS because of a family member that is sure he has it and tried to convince me I have it too, he sent me this paper and I was wondering if it could be easily disproven…”
Are you trolling? One cannot disprove EHS for the same logical reason that one cannot disprove the existence of Russell’s teapot.
Furthermore, neither I nor anyone else owns the burden of disproving anything. Let me just assure you that you really needn’t worry about a few milliwatts of electromagnetic radiation because they pale into insignificance compared to the circa 1000 watts of a broad spectrum of radiation, peaking at ~9.5 μm wavelength, that every part of your entire body and brain are exposed to, every second of every day that you are alive.
If you are genuinely interested in learning about EHS then these are useful resources (I gave you the RationalWiki link the first time you mentioned EHS):
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, RationalWiki
electro-sensitives & electrohypersensitivity, The Skeptic’s Dictionary
The only sure way to start suffering from EHS, is to start believing that you are suffering from EHS. The worst symptom of holding this belief is, I think, crippling OCD.
ME/CFS and FMS(fibromyalgia) are syndromes and if a person fits the criteria for both of those syndromes, it’s a comorbidity and a common one, they do not exclude each other, there are other differential diagnoses that can exclude them, you are not an MD with expertise in those diagnoses so please don’t try to exclude mine or others based on your logic and your understanding from anecdotes, this is demeaning and not evidence based.
https://batemanhornecenter.org/providers/comorbid-conditions/
Neuroinflammation and microglial activation are some of the leading theories in those complex diagnoses by organizations and leading researchers in the field
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6335565/#s6
https://meassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/MEA-Research-Review-Study-suggests-brain-inflammation-in-MECFS-15.01.19.pdf
https://www.meresearch.org.uk/could-brain-scans-and-artificial-intelligence-help-diagnose-me-cfs/
https://www.fibromyalgiafund.org/detecting-brain-inflammation-using-pet/
about the EHS, disprove was a bad choice of words, I just wanted an expert opinion on their claims in the paper as I also consider it pseudoscience, I did read the rational wiki article before.
For the botanicals, lets leave it for the research to show, I prefer Dr Younger to choose which ones are promising and worthy of testing, you are welcome to ask him directly why he chose to try curcumin despite the contradicting evidence, as both of us are not experts on the matter.
He explains some of it here(he responds to some YT comments as well):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpyhKSQxH6w
The botanicals research is more of a band aid to find highly available treatments that don’t require a prescription and not the main focus, he is also trying to get dextro-naltrexone approved for research, which may work better than regular low dose naltrexone(also for the same neuroinflammation theory), developing new imaging techniques(one to track possible leukocytes in the brain), implementing decentralized clinical trials(very important in severe ME/CFS) etc.
In your haste to be offended, you seem to have overlooked the context from which I write:
I live in the UK therefore my terminology and descriptions will differ from yours.
95.75% of the total world population does not reside in the United States.
Regarding your remark “you are not an MD with expertise in those diagnoses”: neither are you; and neither is Jarred Younger. I find your remark quite odd because via the UK NHS referral process, such expertise is obtained from specialists (usually in a hospital setting) who report their findings back to the patient’s NHS general practitioner (GP).
The (difficulty with) diagnosis and acceptance of ME/CFS under the UK NHS was, and still is, heavily influenced by the 1955 outbreak at the Royal Free Hospital, London, being attributed to mass hysteria. Many of our GPs still believe that most if not all of their ME/CFS patients actually have a primarily (if not wholly) psychosomatic condition. I’ve had involvement with this very sad state of affairs, in various roles, for nearly five decades. At the beginning of my involvement I found that the arduous journey from onset of debilitating symptoms, to a final diagnosis of either ME or fibromyalgia, took 10–20 years.
Perhaps you will explain to the readers what is gained, medically and/or financially, in the USA by patients who have the dual diagnosis — ME/CFS and fibromyalgia — because in the UK, a dual diagnosis, especially when combined with EHS or similar bogus medical illnesses, is likely to be detrimental; particularly to patients who need to claim state benefits because they are unable to work.
I’m also not from the US but our criteria here is based on theirs.
The link I provided was for Bateman Horne center, which is a famous specialists center for ME/CFS and FMS, they provide medical education on the matter to healthcare providers around the world.
Here is a link from the ME association UK explaining the same thing:
“If a person meets the diagnostic
criteria for ME/CFS and has
widespread pain and tenderness,
then it is reasonable for a diagnosis
of both FM and ME/CFS to be
made.”
https://meassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Fibromyalgia-and-MECFS-JULY-2021.pdf
Many of GPs and even neurologists and rheumatologists all around the world don’t believe in ME/CFS and some don’t believe in FMS as well although I think it’s a bit less transparent, it is not only in the UK, more than anything, I think the UK PACE trial did a real number on us patients
It took me more than 6 years to get a diagnosis of FMS and 3 more for ME/CFS.
PEM is specific to my ME/CFS diagnosis and my widespread pain fits the FMS criteria so what is the problem to diagnose with both? and how exactly this dual diagnosis will hurt getting benefits compared to one?
Can you even get an official EHS diagnosis from an MD?? this has nothing to do with my diagnoses and I mentioned twice I consider it pseudoscience.
The benefit of having both is the possibility to get treatment to one of them that the other won’t get, like medical cannabis for FMS or low dose abilify for ME/CFS, participate in research for each of them.
Benefits for either is nearly impossible to get, but still easier for FMS here because it is more known.
How is the evidence-based medication stinging nettle applied? 💊 ❤️🔥
Intrarectally? Really?
My mother always threatened that medicine had to taste bitter!