Comments on: Cold-fX: More Hype than Hope for Colds and the Flu

By: CAM and Canadian Family Physicians | PEI Curmudgeon's Blog

CAM and Canadian Family Physicians | PEI Curmudgeon's Blog — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 01:03:54 +0000

[...] for the paper itself, they look at garlic, echinacea. vitamin C, ginseng, zinc, and probiotics.Tthe references are a hodgepodge of studies. I was able to read some of the [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 01:02:15 +0000

Just a quick bout of curiosity. I’m not really concerned with the efficacy of this product, but I am concerned and uncertain about the warning that it’s not recommended for pregnant or breastfeeding women. Is there an explanation as to why it isn’t safe for pregnant women? If it is indeed just a sexed up sugar pill, then what is causing danger to pregnancy?

By: Cold-fX redux: « Sarah's asthma blog

Cold-fX redux: « Sarah's asthma blog — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:53:02 +0000

[...] February 1, 2011 sarahsasthmablog Leave a comment Go to comments I’ve just discovered a Science-Based Pharmacy article on the topic, which referred me to this excellent post by the Ottawa Skeptics. They’re both [...]

By: Jay Love

Jay Love — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 03:21:15 +0000

I used to live in northern Alberta, a nasty place in the winter time. To make matters worse I worked for a oil company for 16 years……. with the pollution, bus rides to work (with sick people) and the cold weather I was sick almost half the winter.

Desperate to try anything I used Cold FX as a daily and upped the dose as precribed when getting sick or sick…. I followed that process for one winter… the results were: Nothing was different from any other winter, I was sick with the same frequency as always….

I came to find that getting a good sleep, avoiding hangovers and low stress, worked the best for me.

PS. Good Article !!!

By: karl

karl — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:22:40 +0000

Last year I went a year without a head cold. The only thing I seemed to be doing different in life is I was using my condo’s sauna 2-3 days a week. Ah ha! Must be the sauna! Or, no. It might have been an odd year when I got lucky and avoided colds. If I was taking Cold FX, I’m sure I would have attributed my cold-proof year to Cold FX. The next year if colds came back, I might think “oh it’s because I’ve changed my diet but luckily the Cold FX is keeping the colds from being even worse.” One can rationalize it anyway you want.

Also, consider the gambler’s bias. Gambler’s tend to report their wins and rarely trumpet their losses. If you’re spending $400 a year on Cold FX, you might tend to remember those random occasions when get a less severe cold, credit Cold FX, and file drawer or explain away those times when Cold FX didn’t seem to work on a cold.

End of the day, there is only one way to eliminate this complex chain of bias. Double blind placebo trials. It can be done. It’s not difficult, not difficult like, say, trying to set up a valid placebo for acupuncture. Cold FX has the money to do it.

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 06:22:53 +0000

Well, as a scientist of sorts, I must admit the results of the studies are annoyingly weak. I appreciate the skeptical blog, but in this case I would have liked to know about the implied process (what are the immune cells purported to increase), whether is was measured or not. The reality is that science is ill prepared to do really good ingested chemical analysis’ in a meaningful way. My guess is that this company, were really on to something….but realized that there was very little chance they could somehow get a bunch of people together, all at the same time with onset of colds, and do the proper study…so they managed the problem as good as can be expected. I have noticed HUGE spikes in ‘feeling good’ when I take just two tablets and notice that if I am coming down with a cold it might as well give up, cause the sniffles go away after one Kleenex. This past year was the first I didn’t get sick even once in a long time and I had every reason to actually be more sick than normal owing to stress, baby sick from day care all the time etc. I originally tried the product after already being sick, and it did not seem to help much, but who knows how long the symptoms were to last otherwise. My largest caution is that the immune system has a normal way it runs things and somehow fooling it to send more troops might be something you won’t want to do every day. In fact, the studies done above lead me to suspect that the method of going on and on and on would predict failure, not help the cause.

Final point? Anyone out there break open a pill and eat the contents straight? There is no flippin way that’s sugar all by itself!…very concentrated and potent tasting substance…I recommend it to everyone I know with the above admonitions.

By: karl

karl — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:35:51 +0000

Geoff in your restaurant example, I believe you’re conflating something that’s a matter of opinion “well, I like Lady Gaga” vs a testable claim “If I throw this ball in the air, it will come down.”

Cold FX makes a very testable claim, like my gravity example. However, in my gravity example, gravity is not subject to placebo. The placebo effect, however, is well documented. For example, if you tell someone they’re drinking $100 bottle of wine, they’ll truly enjoy it more even though it’s $2 plonk.

Cold FX does not state “well, try it because it seems to work for us”. They state clearly it’s clinically proven. What does that mean? The author of this blog has examined that claim.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 03:33:34 +0000

I do agree that scientific minds need scientific answers. Do I need scientific research for everything, no. When you go to a restaurant and try a new dish do you need a 20 page essay by a popular lab to tell me to order a shrimp pasta. Bottom line try it and if it works then great, if not then don’t buy it again. I don’t take it all year but at the first signs of a cold I do take it with 50-60g of vitamin C and I can see the difference between myself and the rest of m family, and that is all the evidence I need.

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:13:45 +0000

The statement is grammatically poor but was an attempt to distill population-level findings to patient-level relevance. I don’t think there are data to identify any subgroup that benefited. We have to be cautious about post-hoc data dredging to find correlations between those that didn’t get colds, as it’s inevitable we’ll find something if we run enough subgroup analyses. From an efficacy perspective we have to evaluate the drug from the population level, from the perspective of everyone that receives it, because we don’t have any a priori way of identifying responders.

By: Donald

Donald — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:41:38 +0000

Something is unclear to me. In the phrase “0.25 less colds over a 16 week period” it sounds like poor grammar. Is “less” colds supposed to mean “fewer” colds, or is the use of “less” a deliberate measure to convey a subtle difference in meaning?

I’m not merely quibbling about grammar. It sounds like the results of occurrence of colds across a group of individuals is being applied statistically to the likelihood of effectiveness for a single individual. But the reality, I think, is that it’s not that Cold FX is effective such-and-such a percentage of the time for EVERY individual; rather, it seems to be effective for some individuals and less so for others. In this way, I think the interpretation of the data may be flawed.

Should the question not be, then, what is different in those individual cases in which it seems to be effective? Could it be that those individuals for whom it is effective are doing something else right which, combined with Cold FX, leads to a reduction in number of colds, duration of symptoms, severity of symptoms, or whatever? There are numerous lifestyle factors that could potentially undermine the effectiveness of the product which, in the absence of those factors, may yet prove to be significantly effective. Or, likewise, there could be lifestyle factors that enhance the product’s effectiveness.

The data does not refute the possibility that for some individuals Cold FX is extremely effective. I’m not saying this is necessarily the case, but if it is — and again, the data leaves the possibility open — it’s worth investigating.