Echinacea is crap

For years people have been telling me to take echinacea when I felt a cold coming on.  Reluctantly I would do it.  One particular unreliable acquaintance in New York used to distill her own echinacea.  So pathological was she, that I imagined her in Central Park just grabbing a handful of weeds, boiling them down and selling them with the malicious thought, "they’ll never know the difference".

Yeah, I didn’t like her much.

Now a rigorous and large controlled study (NYT)
shows that echinacea has absolutely no efficacy on the onset of the
common cold.   I assume this means I’m free of having to take echinacea
from now on when I start to sniffle around others.

Now if I can just find a study dismissing zinc swabs up the nose…