There's somewhat limited but encouraging evidence that this herb is effective and relatively safe to use. More limited data suggest it may (as with echinacea) act to prevent an upper respiratory infection from developing.

Some of the advertising hype seems over the top, but it sounds like this could be worth a try.

Really, it is almost a non-issue for me, now that I use zinc gluconate every time I might have been exposed to cold germs. One spritz in each nostril before bedtime in such cases has kept me cold-free for almost three years now. However, I also have a reduced sense of smell, since the zinc gluconate is hard on the little fibers that assist one to smell things.

I used to get very ill every time I had a cold, so a backup plan is still of interest to me.

For those preferring to avoid Chinese herbal products and the risk of adulteration, there's an Andrographis supplement exported from Sweden.

France uses 10.6% of their gross domestic product on health care and have the #1 rated all around health care system in the world. They use medicinal herbs too. The US uses 15.3% of their GDP and are ranked #37 all around health care in the world. They don't use herbs. France is improving ever year. The US is not. With our new president, things will now change hopefully.

OakLeif, why do you keep bringing up issues with the politics surrounding access to health care with out actually doing anything to show that Herbs would improve the situation. Yes there are major problems with our system, no that does not mean that any possible other syste will fix them.

The claim that Andrographis or any other drug is effective against such a wide range of organisms (fast-growing bacteria, slow reproducers like TB, viruses) should be viewed with skepticism. It's just not realistic to expect that any product will be a panacea, "good for what ails you", although that view still is popular in alternative medicine (just look at all the posts on apple cider vinegar, to provide one example).

Check out the opening post in this thread, which says "There's somewhat limited but encouraging evidence that this herb (Andrographis) is effective and relatively safe to use. More limited data suggest it may (as with echinacea) act to prevent an upper respiratory infection from developing."

That sounds positive to me, and certainly does more for herbalism than posting unrelated rants about the U.S. medical system.

As for the French, I'm not sure which AIDS drug you are talking about, AZT was the first AIDS drug and it was invented in Michigan, Abacavir was made by GlaxoSmithCline (and the patent is up the day after christimas), I think that the Cocktail was a concepts that the American National Institutes of Health came up with too.

Water is cheaper than Herbs, and Air is even cheaper than water, Why not just breathe to make our selves healthy again? Being Inexpensive and not having negative side effects is not the only thing to take in to account, efficacy is a big one too.

China was a large country since time immorial and all asians had the basic medical knowledge when Western medicine and europeans came out of the caves. In the 1700s our main medical practice was mostly witchcraft. The Catholic monks were just beginning to use herbal medicines which they learned from arabic sources from the Holy Land and the Arabs learned it through the spice and silk routes from (HANG ON TO YOUR HAT) China. Oh and of course from local witches. They used herbs. Do you know the history of why so called witches came to be villified? Be glad to tell you if you ask nicely.
We would not have modern medicine without the knowledge of herbalism and folklore as a solid foundation to build on. So give credit where credit is due. There are some great things in modern medicine but there are also great fallacys. Mankind has a long way to go to completely come down from the trees(or savannah) Or from a christian point of view. Do you really think you'll ever know as much as God?
Actually air is not cheap and have you paid a water bill lately? Obiviously Not!!! We must not overlook the fact that if clean air and water were available without all the chemicals and ithout all the humans polluting everything (americans too) We'd be in great shape. Did you know the Native americans were very healthy before the white man came along and destroyed everything natural and spread disease. Of course they managed a little revenge they gave us sylphyllus. I can hear you say "not in america." Read about the polution spill in Tenn this week?

You are talking about the isolation of the virus, A story I am familiar with actually, and it did not end in a tie, the Nobel comity actually settled the issue in favor of the french team. Neither team was working on drugs, or cures, No one has discovered a cure yet although one man was functionally cured when he recieved a bone marrow transplant from a donor who had the CCR5x-Mu35 mutation which renders the Chemicine receptors that HIV attaches too unreceptive to the viral particle, accounting for a sizable percentage of the individuals who are immune to HIV.

Your view of history is quite skewed, when Europeans were mostly living in caves was long before the modern Asians (the round skulled "mongaloids") even existed, It is a very impressive feat to have any kind of medical system tens of thousands of years before you are born I will grant you that. The Geography of the asian continent is favorable for a unified china, its a great place to take over, so it can't help but be big, because if you manage to take a third you are going to take the whole thing, In 1 AD the roman empire actually had more people than china, this does not reflect on the medical systems nearly as much as it does the military.

I also find the claim that Catholic monks learned herbalism from the Arabs, The herbs that grow in the desert are quite distinct from the herbs that grow in the mountains, and the lowlands, and forests. Instead the European herbal traditions were developed by Europeans, and transient groups that moved about Europe such as the Gypsies. The Herbs that grow in china do not grow in the middle east either, although dried herbs were passed along the silk road for certain. I write as I read so I wrote the last bit before reading the witches part of your post, on that we agree, obviously, although I wouldn't necessarily call them witches.

The witch hunts were probably fueled largely by "Physicians" however, and all of this took place well before modern medicine, but many a midwife was treated as a witch and driven out of practice.

I will also agree that Modern medicine grew out of the folklore that preceded it, just like modern astronomy grew from astrology and chemistry from alchemy; but those prescientific endeavors are not what I would call the "a solid foundation" they were rotting wooden foundations stuck into the earth, and it was only through carefully going in and cutting out the rot and replacing it with solid knowledge that we were able to build great things where those failed attempts stood (that is assuming that we can all agree that 35 year lifespan after tend of thousands of years is a failure, if you consider that success then speak up, personally I like that we have doubled the average lifespan in the last 200 years using increasingly modern medicine).

I'm not sure what you are getting at with the Christian point of view issue, Did I claim to know more than God? (Or, dare I say it, to be a Christian? Are you going to attack me for my lack of Christian beliefs? I certainly hope that you will not, and think that I can expect that much from you) Did the Christian God ever claim to have provided Herbs for medicine? Or that we would never advance or skills beyond pure herbal medicine? Would you care to quote me some scripture or a precedent or are we working off of a revelation that happened directly to you? Incidentally (although I'd rather not make this a religious thread) do you put up and decorate a Christmas tree every year? Jeremiah 10:2-4 might be something for you to take a look at if that is the case.

When was the last time you paid for Air? Compressed air perhaps, or a can of air, or O2, CO2, or N2 gas, but no one gives you a bill for breathing. As for water yes you pay a big bill, especially if you live in an arid place, but really for ounce of water you are paying a negligible amount, its just that you use so much water, and you have to pay for it to be cleaned and pumped too you, and for the infrastructure that is used to do that. If you have a well no one charges you for it (although electricity for a well pump is not cheap).

I'm not really sure how pollution came in to this argument either, but I'll address the issue. It is absolutely undeniable that pollution from chemical spills and power plants and fires and the like are horrible for our health, Coal fired power plants are responsible for about 60,000 American deaths each year because they are such a large source of particulate pollution (we would need a Chernobyl sized accident every three weeks in the US to match that death toll, probably the environmental damage too) that is why I donate money to the green party, but this is all industrial pollution. If we look back to the Native Americans yes the diseases we brought over did major harm, and slaughtering them probably didn't help their numbers either, but they killed many Europeans and diseases spread both ways as you mentioned (Montezuma revenge?), The Native Aericans did not live in a garden of Eden however (well if you are Mormon I guess you think that some of them lived where the garden of Eden used to be somewhere in Missouri), They still had indoor fires (and they did not use chimneys to evacuate the smoke, which exposed them to a large number of carcinogens and particulate materials) and they had the same problems dealing with feces as the rest of humanity, the flush toilet is truly fantastic, The europeans just brought different germs (and possibly more, africa and eurasia and australia had traffic between them, spreading the disease around among a lot of people) the diseases were not necessarily worse.

On the subject on affordability that is a very nice thing, but really all the affordability in the world doesn't mean jack squat if the remedies do not work. In the west there is a medical paradox that we see. When ever a hospital sets out to drive down costs the costs go up, when ever a hospital sets out to improve outcome (through use of the best procedures and interventions) the costs fall, we need to focus on getting the best procedures and the means of production for these procedures into African hands, but that is a political issue and not an herbal versus non-herbal issue. X-ray machines can be built in Africa too.

There is no "western world view" when it comes to medicine, rather an emphasis on evidence-based medicine (EBM) as opposed to relying on folklore and anecdotes. EBM is increasingly being adopted by the Chinese.