Echinacea - One Herb Proven To Boost Immune System

Echinacea a herbaceous plant (in botanical use simply herb)
There are nine different species and are commonly called purple cone flowers.

I know this is kinda side tracking from my normal post of Health and healing foods. I thought this herb worth mentioning.
One of my family members brought Echinacea to my attention, as an immune system booster so since this and our healthwealthfree
network of websites are based on replacing Pharmaceuticals with diet and health foods, I thought a clip on the benefits of echincea was worth a post. Go through the "cold and flu section" of whatever store you happen to frequent and look at the huge array of "Medication"
for colds and flu symptoms and NONE of it designed to CURE anything.

In the 1950s, the German pharmaceutical company Madaus began studying echinacea. Since then, nearly 400 studies have shown that echinacea can be used to improve the immune system in numerous ways. These include increasing activity T-cells, interferon and natural killer cells. Echinacea also destroys many types of viruses and bacteria. Echinacea even makes cells stronger and more resistant to invasion. That's a pretty impressive list of abilities for one herb.

In a study conducted in China in 1990, even people who were perfectly healthy found that echinacea temporarily increased their immune response, even raising their levels of interferon. Echinacea is often used in China with the herb ligustrum in an immune restorative therapy called fuzhung. This treatment, which has been found to increase the manufacture of immune cells in the bone marrow, is sometimes referred to as a deep immunity reaction because it creates more disease-fighting cells, rather than simply stimulating existing ones.

E. angustifolia (one of the Nine species of echinacea) is used as a fortifier of the immune system, mainly to prevent flu and minor respiratory diseases.Native Americans learned of E. angustifolia by observing elk seeking out the plants and consuming them when sick or wounded, and identified those plants as elk root.