"Can Aloe Cure Cancer?"
For a half century, aloe vera gel
processors and distributors,
armed with biblical quotes
and anecdotal testimonials,
have sought recognition for their products—
too often accompanied, however,
by misinformation,
none of which were more elaborate
than promoting aloe vera
for the treatment of cancer.
But, check out this recent case report.
A 64-year-old Hispanic woman
with a tumor on her eyeball,
which looked like a classic case
of ocular surface squamous neoplasia,
a type of eye cancer.
And therefore, surgery was recommended to remove it.
But, the patient declined the surgery and, instead,
initiated the use of concentrated
aloe vera eye drops 3 times a day,
based on a friend’s suggestion.
Just some off-the-shelf aloe vera gel product,
and to the doctors’ surprise,
the lesion showed significant
improvement after just one month.
And, two months later, it went
from this to gone completely.
At the time of writing, it was 6 years later
and it appeared the cancer was gone,
and stayed gone.
Now, normally, you’d go in and
cut it out with wide margins
to make sure you get it all,
because despite the best efforts of the ocular surgeon,
recurrence rates as high as worse-than-a-flip-of-a-coin
have been reported, because there’s
little bits of cancer you miss on surgery.
And, here, there’s this tumor
that disappeared without surgery.
Are we sure it was cancerous, though?
Well, she refused a biopsy; so, we don’t know for certain.
However, it did have all the defining characteristics.
And so, to see it disappear without
any side effects, and stay gone
is pretty extraordinary.
Surgical resection still remains
the recommended treatment,
but, at least, there’s an option
for patients to try if they don't
want to go down that route.
Of course, this was just a single case report,
no control group; it’s not like
she had tumors in both eyes and just tried the aloe on one.
There was a controlled study suggesting aloe could prolong
survival in those with advanced untreatable cancer,
but it wasn't a randomized controlled study,
but a decade later, there was.
Hundreds of patients with metastatic
cancer randomized to receive
chemotherapy with or without aloe,
and the aloe group had three times
the number of complete responses,
significantly greater objective
tumor responses, and two-thirds
had some level of disease
control compared to only half
in the non-aloe group.
But, does that translate out
into improved survival?
Yes.
For example, at one year,
70% of the aloe group was still alive,
whereas most of non-aloe group
was dead.
And, as a bonus, the chemo was better tolerated
in the aloe group, with less fatigue,
for example, and better maintenance of their immune system.
So, given the better disease control,
given the better survival,
this study seems to suggest that aloe
may be a successful add-on therapy
in terms of both tumor regression rate
and survival time.
Now, this was a randomized
controlled study, but not a randomized
placebo-controlled study.
It’s not like the control group
was getting like some fake aloe drink;
so, some of the tumor response
may have been like a
mind-over-matter placebo effect.
Now, there are potential downsides.
As I explained in a previous video,
swallowing aloe can, in rare cases,
trigger liver inflammation,
and cause electrolyte imbalances
due to diarrhea or vomiting.
For example, there was a case reported
of aloe-induced low potassium
in a patient with breast cancer,
which rapidly resolved once she stopped the aloe,
thought to be due to the laxative
effect aloe can have.
If you want to talk to your doctor
about giving it a try,
note this was not aloe vera,
but aloe arborescens, a tree-like aloe
that can grow to be like 10 feet tall.
The concoction they made was a mixture
of about two thirds of a pound of fresh
aloe leaves to a pound of honey,
plus about three tablespoons of
40% alcohol given orally at a dose
of two teaspoons three times a day
starting 6 days prior to the onset of chemo.