"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..
