As flu season creeps up on the Northern Hemisphere, cold and flu relief medications will inevitably fly off store shelves. A natural remedy that shoppers might reach for is elderberry, a small, blackish-purple fruit that companies turn into syrups, lozenges and gummies.
Though therapeutic uses of the berry date back centuries, Michael Macknin, a pediatrician at the Cleveland Clinic, hadn’t heard of using elderberry to treat the flu until a patient’s mother asked him about it. Some industry-sponsored research claims that the herbal remedy could cut the length of the symptoms by up to four days. For a comparison, Tamiflu, an FDA-approved treatment, only reduces flu duration by about a single day. “I said, 'Gee, if that’s really true [about elderberry], it would be a huge benefit,'” Macknin says.
