Herbal remedies appear side by side with pharmaceuticals on pharmacy store shelves

• Standing inside a downtown Chicago chain drugstore, shopper Beth McClanahan considered the product Zicam.
• Stuffy noses and sore throats are driving many cold sufferers to herbal and homeopathic remedies.
• But like McClanahan, consumers may not realize they're buying alternative medicines when they choose wildly popular products such as Airborne and Zicam, both shelved alongside traditional medicines in the cold and flu aisles of chain drugstores.
• The makers of both medicines have paid for their own clinical studies to test their products.
• But Airborne and Zicam have not been reviewed for safety and effectiveness by the Food and Drug Administration, unlike prescription and new over-the-counter drugs.
• Consumers want them and they're effective," said Rider McDowell, co-founder of the company that created Airborne, an herbal supplement that's a bestseller at stores like Walgreens, Osco and CVS Pharmacy.
• Last month, the Institute of Medicine, citing the popularity of dietary supplements, called for tougher rules to make sure they're safe and effective.
• Herbal products and homeopathic remedies are regulated separately, and the law lays out only a few quality controls and labeling rules.
• Homeopathy is based on the idea that tiny amounts of certain natural substances stimulate the body's healing response.
• Some studies seem to suggest that homeopathic remedies work, but many mainstream doctors consider them quackery.
• The trend of integrating "natural" remedies with mainstream drugs on store shelves started in the early 1990s.
• A drugstore chain shelved Hyland's remedy for babies' teething pain with the rest of its teething products.
• Cold-Eeze is not as highly diluted as some homeopathic products.
• While Zicam contains one part per 100 of zinc, a Cold-Eeze lozenge contains 13.3 mg of zinc.
• After homeopathic products led the way, the herbal supplement Airborne became the most recent cold remedy crossover success.