COLUMN ONE : This Is as Catching as a Cold : Urbanites are turning to a vile-smelling herbal potion at the first sign of sniffles. Word of mouth has brought the odd root extract into the mainstream.

It’s cold season. You’d have to live in a cave not to know it. The sneezing. The coughing. The ads that promise relief from sneezing and coughing.

But not everybody in town is snorting nasal spray and popping decongestants. In certain circles--and not necessarily the ones you might expect--a vile-smelling brown liquid is making the rounds, passed from friend to friend, even recommended by some physicians.

The all-natural, herbal extract--called echinacea and goldenseal combination--makes no promises on its label. Nonetheless, health food stores and pharmacies report that they cannot keep enough on their shelves. Perfectly normal-looking people have been seen--at work, in restaurants, in movie theaters--choking down eyedroppers full of the odd, bitter mixture.

“Everybody’s all excited about it,” said Frances Cattermole-Tally, a UCLA folklorist and executive editor of the “Encyclopedia of American Popular Beliefs and Superstitions” who took an interest in echinacea and goldenseal after a woman she met at a Los Angeles Country Club luncheon told her it was “the best thing in the world” for colds.

“If you think this is just the vegetarians in West L.A., that isn’t so,” Cattermole-Tally said. “It’s the latest craze.”

Such popularity is not the result of a slick Madison Avenue advertising campaign. Instead, word of mouth seems to have fueled this fad, helping it leap beyond the New Age fringe and into the mainstream. Echinacea and goldenseal--like the common cold--is catching on one person at a time.

Especially in a paved-over, smoggy, crowded city such as Los Angeles, there is something alluring about the notion that Mother Nature could solve our problems if we would only let her.

“The belief that you are going back to mother, to home, to a simpler way. The belief that the native savage in the wild had found the answers, the key,” said Michael Harris, a historian of pharmacy at the National Museum of American History. “People like these ideas.”

Particularly in Los Angeles, where the body reigns supreme and “colonic irrigation” has its own Yellow Pages category.

Last fall, researchers reported that dietary supplements of the metal chromium can extend the life span of rats. In a flash, chromium picolinate became a hot ticket at health food stores throughout the area--a binge that persists to this day. No wonder the $1-billion-a-year herbal industry counts Los Angeles among its top markets.

But now it’s winter, and as the seasons change, so do the body’s needs.

Despite a lack of consensus about the effectiveness of echinacea and goldenseal, people who take it--who sip it in tea and dribble it into their babies’ bottles--say it makes them feel in control of their health. At the onset of sniffles, instead of resigning themselves to inevitable runny noses and throbbing temples, they mount a herbal defense. They say $5 to $10 an ounce is a small price to pay for the chance to stand up and fight.

“Hearing about it, I got this idea: ‘God, I can prevent getting sick.’ I thought, ‘This is it! Why haven’t I been taking it before?’ ” said Susan Walker, a Venice psychologist who tried echinacea and goldenseal when a screenwriter friend recommended it last fall. Even before she swallowed her first dose, she said the discovery alone made her “feel powerful where otherwise you felt helpless.”

The grapevine is a powerful promoter, but it is not without its quirks. For one thing, it has created a mini-mythology about Janet Zand, 41, a Santa Monica acupuncturist and doctor of Oriental medicine whose trademark echinacea and goldenseal combination, Insure Herbal, is cooked up in a small, strong-smelling factory in Marina del Rey.

In Los Angeles, many people who have never met Zand refer to her by her first name, as in “Janet says Insure Herbal lasts forever,” or “Janet is impossible to get in to see.” One woman said she was sure “Janet” was British. (Zand said: “I was born in Manhattan.”)

The rumor mill also has a way of muddying even the clearest message. Information passed from friend to friend tends to change a bit along the way, leading to widely varying beliefs about how or why to take echinacea and goldenseal. Some people say it should be taken for no more than a week straight, followed by at least a week off. Others say it should be taken no more than five days in a row. Still others say four days on, two days off.

Some people refrigerate it. Others keep it on the shelf. Some swear that it must be shaken. Others let it settle. Some dilute the liquid in water. Others look down their noses at this “wimpy” method, choosing to squirt the pungent stuff into the mouth. Even within this camp, there are stylistic differences: some squirt on top of the tongue, others let it dissolve underneath, others try to hold it in the throat for as long as possible.

Herbalists have heralded the healing powers of echinacea and goldenseal for centuries. Echinacea, commonly known as coneflower or Kansas snakeroot, has long been used as a folk remedy to improve the appetite, cleanse the blood, heal wounds and stimulate the immune system. Goldenseal, or hydrastis, has been said to cure everything from ulcers to bladder infections.

Then again, according to Cattermole-Tally, the folklorist, drinking boiled grapefruit, wearing green peppers around the neck and greasing the soles of the feet have also been said to soothe the sinuses. Whether the two popular herbs live up to their folksy reputations is unclear.

James Harvey Young, a professor emeritus of American social history at Emory University and author of “American Health Quackery,” is skeptical. He said herbal remedies are too often vended with “verbal labeling” from salespeople who credit the products with powers better ascribed to the placebo effect.

“Nothing ever dies in quackery,” Young said. “In the folk culture, there’s a residual feeling that you do something, you get better and therefore what you did made you better--the sun rises, the cock crows and therefore the cock’s crowing made the sun rise. . . . To be sure, valuable medicines have come from nature. But nature is being misused.”

The Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency charged with determining the safety and efficacy of most things eaten or prescribed, does not weigh in either way on most herbal remedies. Brad Stone, an FDA spokesman, said the agency concerns itself mostly with making sure that herbal products--which the FDA treats as foods, not drugs--make no unsubstantiated health claims.

“I could come to the conclusion that eating an apple a day will keep the doctor away,” Stone said. “As long as the company that markets apples doesn’t put that in their advertising, we’re not in the business of telling consumers what they ought to believe in terms of wives tales.”

The result: Makers of herbal extracts list their ingredients on each package, but make no promises. Labels describe the active agents in vague terms: the “supporting herbs” are designed to address “imbalances in your well-being” by being “potent, yet soothing; specific, yet complete.”

Amid the cayenne and calcium, garlic and ginseng in the nutritional supplements aisle of Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Food Market in West Los Angeles, a dozen concoctions include echinacea, goldenseal or both. The liquid formulas include Echinacea Goldenseal Supreme, Echinacea Premium Blend, EchinaGuard and Echinaforce. Tablets are sold under names such as Wellness Formula and Chinese Herbal Defender System.

By all accounts, Angelenos tend to favor the local brand--the Zand formula. To the uninitiated, its straightforward gray and blue label reads like a recipe for witches’ brew: the stuff includes burdock and prairie dock root, skullcap herb and bayberry bark.

Recommended dosage is 15 to 20 drops, three times daily or every two hours “in acute cases.” Consumers who wonder: “Acute cases of what? “ are given no help in discovering the answer. But retailers say that thanks to the grapevine, many already know.

Here is a glimpse of the grapevine in action:

Stephen Gatta, a West Hollywood waiter and actor, got the lowdown on echinacea and goldenseal from his younger brother, Ken. Soon, Gatta was carrying the bottle with him everywhere. One night, Gatta took a swig in a darkened movie theater, arousing the curiosity of the friend sitting next to him, Jay Foley.

“I had tried some homeopathic stuff before--something from Switzerland called Bioforce, some herbal thing for muscle spasms--that didn’t do a damn thing,” said Foley, a massage therapist and waiter from Eagle Rock. “I thought it was a bunch of hoo-ha.”

But peer pressure can wear a guy down, especially when he is sneezing. When Foley felt the first inklings of a cold, he gave it a try. His assessment: “It tastes horrible--just like it smells. It looks really ugly too. But it worked.”

The other night, Foley was at work at Cobalt Cantina, a Silver Lake eatery, when one of his customers pulled out a bottle of echinacea and goldenseal and set it on the table. Ned Pinger, budget director of UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, said he was trying the stuff for the first time.

Pinger, who lives in Hancock Park, said he had heard about it for years from his friend Jan Waldman, who lives in Santa Monica. She started using it after her pediatrician recommended it for her daughter’s earaches.

But Pinger did not try the stuff until one of his budget analysts, Andy Young, heard that Pinger was coming down with something and delivered a bottle to his home. Young, who had read about echinacea and goldenseal in the Whole Earth Catalogue, said he swore by the stuff.

“A personal testimonial--what could be more persuasive?” said William Jarvis, professor of health promotion and education at Loma Linda University’s School of Public Health and president of the National Council Against Health Fraud. “Word of mouth is . . . quackery’s most effective line of diffusion.”

Jarvis worries that people are being suckered in by herbal remedies--echinacea and goldenseal, he said, “obviously has no usefulness for colds or we would all be using it.”

Moreover, he said, the lack of information on the package allows ignorance to spread. Many people believe that if a little herbal remedy is good, a lot is better--an assumption that Jarvis calls dangerous.

“The word natural has been used to sell everything from cigars to underwear. It seems to say safe. But herb is just a four-letter word for drug,” he said. “It’s the gambler’s fallacy--that there’s nothing to lose. But because these are not tested for safety, we don’t know what their long-term effects are.”

One can even find echinacea and goldenseal in some doctor’s offices. A handful of Los Angeles’ traditionally trained physicians are proponents of the herbal concoction, such as Dr. Jay N. Gordon, a pediatrician in Santa Monica who says he recommends it at least once a day as a “first-line treatment for infection.”

“I don’t understand it completely,” he said. “I cannot explain it, and I don’t attempt to explain it. On the other hand, it was not that long ago that we couldn’t explain how aspirin works.”

The National Institutes of Health’s new Office of Alternative Medicine may soon shed some light on the matter. In the coming months it will be gathering proposals from researchers who want to study therapies considered outside mainstream healing--from herbal remedies to homeopathy to electromagnetism.

But until the results of such studies are in, many Angelenos will continue to make decisions based on friends’ recommendations. Like Susan Walker, the Venice psychologist, did. When her friend Ed Rugoff, a Brentwood screenwriter and producer, told her about his success with echinacea and goldenseal, she got her hopes up.

“I knew there was this whole movement of people who think it’s fabulous--who are almost religious about it. . . . And I had this initial feeling that: ‘Maybe this is it. You’ve been a cynic all these years, but this will work,’ ” Walker said.

She made every adult in the house take it: her husband, Bart, an agent at ICM--even her baby-sitter. And they all got sick.

“My husband said: ‘It’s not working.’ I said: ‘Just take it.’ And I got sicker than I’d been in a long time--a really bad sore throat and cold that lasted and lasted,” Walker said. “I remember being very disappointed. . . . I really wanted it to work.”