Chondroitin of little help with arthritis, study says

Chondroitin, a dietary supplement widely used for treating arthritic joints, is no better than a placebo for reducing pain, researchers reported Monday.
The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at data from 20 clinical trials encompassing 3,846 patients.
"People had the idea that this could be the magic bullet for osteoarthritis, but it cannot be," said Dr. Peter Juni, a medical epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study.
The study suggests that there is no point in starting patients on chondroitin, said Dr. David Felson, an osteoarthritis researcher at Boston University who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. ...more