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Efficacy of Korean red ginseng (Panax ginseng) for middle-aged and moderate level of chronic fatigue patients, 2019, Sung et al

Discussion in 'Other health news and research' started by Dolphin, Nov 24, 2019.

  1. Dolphin

    Dolphin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965229919310659

     
    Hutan, Wonko and Peter Trewhitt like this.
  2. Wonko

    Wonko Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    3g of ginseng or 3g of ginseng extract?

    As theres is a big difference, 3g of extract a day is expensive, and a lot of 'pills'.

    3g of ginseng is a fairly small amount.

    N=1

    I found ginseng to have a significant if very short lived effect, which is not the way it's supposed to work.

    The temporary extra capacity it provided was likely false energy. I took it for about 2 to 3 months during which time, using the likely false energy, I became increasingly damaged and suffered increasing PEM.

    I am not currently taking it.
     
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  3. Peter Trewhitt

    Peter Trewhitt Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Obviously because they are looking at just chronic fatigue we have no idea of how if at all this might be relevant to people with ME.

    Like @Wonko, my personal experience has been that stimulants might be useful short term, but that they only served to delay PEM which subjectively was felt to be subsequently worse when it did kick in.

    This seems to be paralleled by other uses of medication, such as that for preventing migraines when I was still at work part time. I could delay PEM related migraines for a day or so to get through my working week, but then they kicked in with a vengeance.
     
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  4. TigerLilea

    TigerLilea Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I knew this was junk science as soon as I saw that they referred to it as 'chronic fatigue'.
     
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  5. BruceInOz

    BruceInOz Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Is the middle aged thing a post hoc analysis? The abstract makes it sound like the prespecified analysis was null so they went fishing.
     
  6. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    At least they make it obvious that this was the case!
     
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  7. Kalliope

    Kalliope Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I had a doctor over 2o years ago who recommended me to try ginseng. Not sure if it was white or red or if that mattered. He was in fact so curious about ginseng he said he'd like to try for himself, but he just wasn't tired enough o_O

    I'm glad Fluge/Mella are about to start at trial monitoring patients over a period of time without them having any interventions. Not sure if that has been done before and it will be interesting to see whether or not some patients improves, simply because it's a condition that fluctuates.
     
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  8. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I have this superstition that if I ate ginseng I might turn into one of these people that has superstitions about the effects of ginseng.

    (Probably a nocebo effect of no ginseng.)
     
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  9. wdb

    wdb Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Looks like a textbook example of p-hacking, outcomes were negative so they sliced and diced the data until they got it to spit out a significant looking value. Why on earth would it only work for people over 50.

    Where ?
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2019
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