Herbal Healing?

I’ve just finished reading a BBC news article about complimentary therapies to ease the pain of arthritis. This can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7875192.stm It appears that they are over-all, useless. The Arthritis Research Campaign looked at the scientific evidence for over 40 different available treatments; 2/3 of treatments for RA and 1/5 of treatments for OA were found to be ineffective. These included blackcurrant seed oil, collagen, feverflu and vitamins A, C and E. Good old fish oil, however, was given a whopping 5 out of 5 for being effective in reducing joint pain and stiffness!
Ok, firstly, the statistics are a little deceiving; if you read the evidence in a different light you realise that actually 4/5 of alternative treatments for OA were found to be EFFECTIVE. This is good news for avid fans of herbal medicine, surely? My mum for example is always cutting out newspaper and magazine articles to give me about the latest alternative inflammatory saviour. However, I’m quite lucky in the sense that my prescribed medicines are doing a brilliant job already.
My Rheumatologist has also warned that taking fish oil supplements can cause confusion when knowing whether the pain relief is coming from those, or the pills that she’s giving me. In that sense, isn’t it a little dangerous to let an alternative therapy mask the pain when really, we should be trying to treat the condition with ‘proper’ treatment? Or is finding a suitable and helpful non-toxic drug the way forward?

The dude in the video argues that we should be trying to find the root cause of the RA condition rather than trying to suppress it with drugs. Easier said than done...