Norman Swan

In other words, people either ignore those warnings or just they're not effective.

So there you are.

You can make comments to the TGA on this and the recommendation of the health report is steer clear.

And despite all the stuff on the pharmacist's shelf, there's not a single cold and flu preparation on the shelf that makes any difference at all.

Agree.

Mostly causes you side effects rather than actually any benefit.

It does.

It wastes your money.

And just before we go, this is a hobby horse of mine.

The waste of money internationally and time that's been spent on a theory for Alzheimer's disease, which is invalid now.

And we spend more and more money on it, and it's distracted us from an effective solution to Alzheimer's disease.

And it's the idea that this substance in the brain called beta amyloid is a cause of Alzheimer's disease.

Because there's a lot of it in the brain, but people think it's a cause.

And there is very little evidence that it's a cause.

And one of the pointers to this is,

that there are drugs now that are incredibly effective at removing amyloid from the brain, such as there's almost none left.

And the question is, does it make any difference?

So it's not made any difference to people with established dementia.

So what the people have said who are really promoting the idea is, let's move it earlier and earlier to people with mild cognitive impairment, because that's early enough that we can actually make a difference.

And now the Cochrane Library or the Cochrane Collaboration, which brings together the available evidence on this,