Yes I'm giving it a try, because an family friend, a real smart guy not given to hocus pocus swears by it, he has arthritis of the knees and he says it was recommended to it by his own doctor, who had been taking it for years himself
however I did hear recently a doctor who said, first of all you have to be diligent in taking the minimum recommended dosage every day, he said if you are going to get a positive effect, it will take about 3 months to show up and if you are one of the people it benefits, the effect starts to fade after a period of time which I thought was interesting
I,too, am intensely sensitive to anything that smacks of snake oil. However I have been using glucosamine/chondroitin, providing a total of 1500 mg of glucosamine a day for well over a year now. The impact on my knee pain is impressive--in fact, the pain is gone.
I have tried going off the supplement and find that the pain starts to return if I do.