I'd love it if some of the very smart people here would look at the studies. I wish there were a few more.
DH and I are toying with doing our own "study" where she is off or on the med for a few weeks and only one of us knows it. Of course, it would be even better if we gave her an identical-looking placebo during the off weeks, so she didn't know either, and even BETTER if we somehow triple-blinded it so that NONE of us knew which one she was taking. Even BETTER, we could program some device to "beep" at randomized times during the day so we could record her mood/behavior at random intervals...(geeking out)
Of course, this doesn't take the very real placebo effect into account...maybe no placebo is better...
Actually, that's when a placebo is MOST needed; when the effect could conceivably mostly/entirely attributed to such effect, that is.
Unfortunately, not a lot of the pharmacognosy/ethnopharmacology work from the former Soviet bloc is... er...
reproducible, let's just say. Hard to know if it's just the placebo effect or not. I presume that you've done sufficient hunting down of adverse effect and toxicology hypotheses regarding Rhodiola, yes?
I tend to be pretty wary of herbals because of the lack of oversight in the US (as compared to either foodstuffs
or pharmaceuticals, it's very much the honor system in a lot of ways).
The real question is-- if it WAS merely placebo effect, would you really want to know that? If it seems to help, and you're all happier, and there seems to be no long-term usage red flags health-wise, then little harm in not knowing, IMO.
