Sidenote: your cited study is rather old. Has there been no new research since 1997? This would indicate it is not something the medical community feels is worth following up on.
Yes, that says quite bad things about the medical community that they are only focused on things that can be patented to make money. It’s another reason to be distrustful of doctors.
How to have a slight effect on common infections and influenza is definitely not top of mind.
We are not talking about slight effects. We are talking about an extremely huge effect that unfortunately didn’t get studied more to be well validated because it’s not in the financial interest of the system to do so.
The effect for chicken bone broth on reducing length of acute respiratory tract infections according to the literature review is 1-2.5 days reduction which is more than tamiflu’s 0.5-1.5 days while it’s a more general treatment that doesn’t require you to test for the specific virus than you can give it. The N-acetylcysteine effect is comparable to influenza vaccines but more general “only 25% of virus-infected subjects under NAC treatment developed a symptomatic form, versus 79% in the placebo group”.
The reason why it’s okay for a primary care doctor to be unaware is that primary care doctors are supposed to practice medicine based by relying on the general treatment guidelines being good and not supposed to practice based on what individual studies that haven’t been replicated say. On the other hand, NIAID and it’s equivalents all around the world not wanting to study whether those huge effects hold up is not okay.
Let me start by saying my question was genuine. 30 year old research in medicine triggers scepticism in me.
“Yes, that says quite bad things about the medical community that they are only focused on things that can be patented to make money. It’s another reason to be distrustful of doctors.”
Sorry, I don’t subscribe to this. “The medical community” is vastly diverse and merit is not only gained through patentable research.
Which is proven by the point there actually has been ongoing research into the effect of chicken soup on influenza as well as the effect of supplements. The latest study I could find was a 2025 meta-study. One of the underlying studies supports the claim of a 1-2.5 reduction. All support “modest benefits”. All in all I would say the result is not as “extremely huge” as you portray but I do agree further research is warranted to verify and explore the exact mechanisms at play.
Tamiflu also only provides modest benefits and doctors still give it to patients. The benefits are larger than the benefits of standard of care. If those benefits generalize, Galen with his theory of the four humors, Traditional Chinese Medicine and a lot of other traditional systems of medicine outperform the standard of care.
I do think that’s extremely huge. If you would approach this from a modern medicine perspective you can also simply attempt to increase the dose to get a bigger effect.
We do that people with genetic defects that produce glutathione deficiency suffer from recurrent infections. While that does not prove that the average person has a clinical problem where glutathione would reduce infections, it makes it pretty clear that at least some people do and from a mainstream medicine perspective you would want to target them to fix their glutathione deficiency. There seem to be some practical issues where glutathione in different tissues might have different levels and thus testing for glutathione deficiency isn’t straightforward, but this should provide motivation for the research agenda.
Sorry, I don’t subscribe to this. “The medical community” is vastly diverse and merit is not only gained through patentable research.
You need more than the desire to have your merit recognized to raise millions of dollars for a clinical trial.
This is the same dynamic that lead to the medical community getting the simple question of COVID19 being airborne wrong at the beginning of the pandemic that I had no problem getting right. A lot of the research is centered around the needs of big pharma.
If you have another answer why nobody tried to repeat the trial or do another trial to give glycine + NAC vs. NAC vs. Placebo to maybe build glutathione even better, I’m happy to hear that answer. The chatbots that I asked didn’t really come up with another answer.
The nutritional supplements industry does have those millions necessary for clinical trials. A peer-reviewed clinical study is likely to further boost their sales. We don’t know exactly why there hasn’t been another study commissioned. One likely explanation to me seems to be that there is low confidence in achieving results that prove the suggested “extremely huge” impact, and an inherent risk of being reduced to the efficiency level of chicken soup.
There is a case to be made to amend the DSHEA of 1994 (or equivalent legislation in the EU) to enforce more clinical studies for nutritional supplements, which would close this gap in verified knowledge.
One likely explanation to me seems to be that there is low confidence in achieving results that prove the suggested “extremely huge” impact, and an inherent risk of being reduced to the efficiency level of chicken soup.
That sounds to me like you haven’t really thought about the case. NAC has a well validated effect for clinical practice and is a routine medication and running the study for what is essentially off-label use of NAC wouldn’t discourage the on-label use of it which is driving most of the sales.
When ill the body needs cysteine both for glutathione production and for mucus production. NAC is given to help with mucus clearance when patients have problems with that. It’s ironically a supplement that the same doctors office gave me in the previous visit when I came with an acute respiratory tract infection. NAC isn’t an esoteric supplement.
I think directionally the policy of the current US administration of moving the NIH to be less of a servant of Big Pharma is the right step, even when they might mess it up in practice.
Yes, that says quite bad things about the medical community that they are only focused on things that can be patented to make money. It’s another reason to be distrustful of doctors.
We are not talking about slight effects. We are talking about an extremely huge effect that unfortunately didn’t get studied more to be well validated because it’s not in the financial interest of the system to do so.
The effect for chicken bone broth on reducing length of acute respiratory tract infections according to the literature review is 1-2.5 days reduction which is more than tamiflu’s 0.5-1.5 days while it’s a more general treatment that doesn’t require you to test for the specific virus than you can give it.
The N-acetylcysteine effect is comparable to influenza vaccines but more general “only 25% of virus-infected subjects under NAC treatment developed a symptomatic form, versus 79% in the placebo group”.
The reason why it’s okay for a primary care doctor to be unaware is that primary care doctors are supposed to practice medicine based by relying on the general treatment guidelines being good and not supposed to practice based on what individual studies that haven’t been replicated say.
On the other hand, NIAID and it’s equivalents all around the world not wanting to study whether those huge effects hold up is not okay.
Let me start by saying my question was genuine. 30 year old research in medicine triggers scepticism in me.
Sorry, I don’t subscribe to this. “The medical community” is vastly diverse and merit is not only gained through patentable research.
Which is proven by the point there actually has been ongoing research into the effect of chicken soup on influenza as well as the effect of supplements. The latest study I could find was a 2025 meta-study. One of the underlying studies supports the claim of a 1-2.5 reduction. All support “modest benefits”. All in all I would say the result is not as “extremely huge” as you portray but I do agree further research is warranted to verify and explore the exact mechanisms at play.
Tamiflu also only provides modest benefits and doctors still give it to patients. The benefits are larger than the benefits of standard of care. If those benefits generalize, Galen with his theory of the four humors, Traditional Chinese Medicine and a lot of other traditional systems of medicine outperform the standard of care.
I do think that’s extremely huge. If you would approach this from a modern medicine perspective you can also simply attempt to increase the dose to get a bigger effect.
We do that people with genetic defects that produce glutathione deficiency suffer from recurrent infections. While that does not prove that the average person has a clinical problem where glutathione would reduce infections, it makes it pretty clear that at least some people do and from a mainstream medicine perspective you would want to target them to fix their glutathione deficiency. There seem to be some practical issues where glutathione in different tissues might have different levels and thus testing for glutathione deficiency isn’t straightforward, but this should provide motivation for the research agenda.
You need more than the desire to have your merit recognized to raise millions of dollars for a clinical trial.
This is the same dynamic that lead to the medical community getting the simple question of COVID19 being airborne wrong at the beginning of the pandemic that I had no problem getting right. A lot of the research is centered around the needs of big pharma.
If you have another answer why nobody tried to repeat the trial or do another trial to give glycine + NAC vs. NAC vs. Placebo to maybe build glutathione even better, I’m happy to hear that answer. The chatbots that I asked didn’t really come up with another answer.
The nutritional supplements industry does have those millions necessary for clinical trials. A peer-reviewed clinical study is likely to further boost their sales. We don’t know exactly why there hasn’t been another study commissioned. One likely explanation to me seems to be that there is low confidence in achieving results that prove the suggested “extremely huge” impact, and an inherent risk of being reduced to the efficiency level of chicken soup.
There is a case to be made to amend the DSHEA of 1994 (or equivalent legislation in the EU) to enforce more clinical studies for nutritional supplements, which would close this gap in verified knowledge.
That sounds to me like you haven’t really thought about the case. NAC has a well validated effect for clinical practice and is a routine medication and running the study for what is essentially off-label use of NAC wouldn’t discourage the on-label use of it which is driving most of the sales.
When ill the body needs cysteine both for glutathione production and for mucus production. NAC is given to help with mucus clearance when patients have problems with that. It’s ironically a supplement that the same doctors office gave me in the previous visit when I came with an acute respiratory tract infection. NAC isn’t an esoteric supplement.
I think directionally the policy of the current US administration of moving the NIH to be less of a servant of Big Pharma is the right step, even when they might mess it up in practice.