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Article 1

1. Why is the plant dealt with in the article called St. John’s wort?

2. What has this plant been used for since times immemorial and what is it used for now?

3. Why do doctors have doubts about the efficacy of St. John’s wort in treating depression?

4. What clinical trial was held to test the effectiveness of St. John’s wort?

5. What argument could you present to demonstrate that Shelton’s study was basically wrong?

6. How can you comment on the title of the article “St. John’s What?”

St. John’s What?

When you squeeze the bright star-shaped yellow buds of the plant Hypericum perforatum, they yield a red juice that reminded medieval Europeans of the blood of John the Baptist. Valued for its magical healing powers, St. John’s wort (a Middle English word for “plant”) has been used since the time of ancient Greece for treating any number of ailments, from liver and bowel disorders to hysteria, obesity and insomnia.

But St. John’s wort came into its own in 1984, when the German government, on the basis of in-vitro studies, approved its use as a mild, natural antidepressant. Sales took off both in Germany, where St. John’s wort easily outsells prescription drugs like Prozac, and in the US, where concoctions of the herb, sold under such labels as Mood Support and Brighten Up, became flagships of the booming alternative-medicine industry. Before last year’s warnings that St. John’s wort could interfere with other medications – notably AIDS treatments, antibiotics and cardiac drugs – yearly sales reached $310 million. Even today, some 1.5 million Americans take the extract regularly to treat their psychic pain.

Let’s hope they are doing something else to make themselves feel better, because the bloom may just have come off this flower. In what is by far the most definitive study of the efficacy of St. John’s wort in treating major depression, doctors last week concluded that the extract is essentially useless. On the basis of these findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr Richard Shelton, the study’s lead author, says flatly that he wouldn’t recommend St. John’s wort to any of his patients. As for the 30 or so earlier trials showing that the herb had some therapeutic value, he – like many other scientists – dismisses them as badly designed, inadequate or otherwise flawed.

Coming as it did amid reports that federal regulations about to call for tighter controls on dietary supplements, including the memory pill Ginko biloba (which has been found to cause excessive bleeding and, in rare cases, stroke), the study’s conclusions touched a raw nerve among those who see herbal medicine as a gentler, more natural route to healing. The nonprofit American Botanical Council issued a press release criticizing the report as inconclusive, and the supplement industry’s Council for Responsible Nutrition said there was nothing in the study that showed St. John’s wort wouldn’t work in cases of mild to moderate depression. Says the group’s president, John Cordaro: “Consumers wouldn’t use a throat lozenge for strep throat, but that same lozenge might be just right for a scratchy throat.”

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 the same 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 combating 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 of them women in their 40s. All had suffered from major depression for at least four weeks. Some found it difficult for them to get out of bed or care for their children.

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 uppered 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 improved.

Shelton and his colleagues acknowledged that theirs is not the final word. That could come before the end of the year when the National Institute of Health completes a larger three-year study. Instead of simply dividing the patients into two groups – one on St. John’s wort, the other on 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.

(From ‘Time’)

Article 2

1. What does Stephen Barrett featured in the second article consider to be his business?

2. What concrete results did his activities lead to?

3. What is the reaction of herbalists and homeopaths to Barrett’s accusations?

The Man Who Loves to Bust Quacks

No one was less surprised by the news about St. John’s wort than Stephen Barrett, 67, a retired 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 calls 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, 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. It has also made Barrett a lightning rod for herbalists, homeopaths and assorted true believers, who regularly vilify him as dishonest, incompetent, a bully and a Nazi.

None of this seems to daunt Barrett, who has been exposing bogus health claims since the late 1970s, when he first surveyed health-related mail-order ads in national magazines and discovered that none of them lived up to their claims. His findings spurred legislation that authorizes the US government to levy penalties of $25,000 a day on repeat mail-order offenders.

His big breakthrough came in 1985, when he went after the hair-analysis industry. He sent samples from the heads of two healthy girls to 13 laboratories that claimed they could measure nutritional needs based on scientific analysis of an individual’s hair. The reports were so off base and contradictory that his debunking report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and picked up by the national press. “It left the hair analysis industry with an egg on its face,” says Barrett. “Half the labs shut down.”

Other moments followed, none more satisfying to Barrett than the 1998 publication in J.A.M.A. of a report by Emily Rosa, an 11-year-old Colorado girl who for a school science project devised a simple test of therapeutic touch. It demonstrated that practitioners were unable to detect the “human energy field” on which their technique is based. Hearing of Emily’s project, Barrett helped edit the report, got it published and was rewarded with worldwide press coverage.

Chiropractors too have felt Barrett’s sting. While he sees benefits in chiropractic manipulations, he wonders about “a whole profession based on an idea – subluxations – that isn’t true.” He especially deplores the fact that some chiropractors claim that their manipulations can treat infectious diseases and prescribe homeopathic remedies, which he considers worthless.

Barrett retired from his psychiatric practice in 1993 to devote himself full time to quackbusting. Now considers himself an investigative journalist taking full advantage of the power of the Internet. “Twenty years ago, I had trouble getting my ideas through to the media,” he says. “Today I am the media.”

(From ‘Time’)

Now read the articles carefully, find the following words and word combinations in the text and learn their meaning. Make it a particular point to use these word combinations in the further overall discussion of the problem.

Article 1

An ailment, to take off (sales took off), a prescription drug (medication), to interfere with smth, findings, to say something flatly, to dismiss smth as …, to be inadequate/flawed, a dietary supplement, to touch a raw nerve, herbal medicine, a press release, inconclusive, to stand one’s ground.

Article 2

To sniff smth out, health-related, a fraud, to write smth off as …, (a) dispassionate (analysis), to cite smth, to levy a penalty on smb, a breakthrough, to go after smb, a remedy, to get an idea through to smb.