Common garden weed 'cures skin cancer', say scientists

Milkweed is also good for treating chilblains... so is urine. Gone in 5-7 days which is about half the average time.

IRM

reply to post by InfaRedMan

Ha. In a pinch, use what's handy...nature provides!

My paternal grandmother was a "medicine" woman of sorts in her village in Ukraine. Unfortunately, I did not meet her until very late in her life and early in mine and didn't have the time to learn very much from her. Neither did her sons.

I often wonder just how much of this old knowledge we've virtually thrown away but am very happy that there are still books and some people still finding much value in it and sharing it with all of us. We might very well be back to all this before very long, either out of choice or necessity.

Not just one weed.

There's a weed in australia called 'devil's apples' which is extremely good at killing skin cancers. I'll have to post links to some studies for you.

They're testing it for internal cancers too but i think they're going to try to combine it with chemo drugs so that will probably nullify any benefit it may have had.

reply to post by rapunzel222

Very cool, rapunzel. Would love to see that information. I don't think we should call these plants weeds anymore.

oh, the devils apples work on melanoma btw.

yeah; funny; that the plants we call weeds are probbaly extremely good for us.

like stinging nettle has many health benefits.

also funny that our property in Qld was covered with devils apples and we pulled most of them out (they're a biggish prickly bush with prickly apples on them). It was hard work because they covered our paddocks. At the time my grandfather joked that they were probably the cure for cancer.

then years down the track i found out they probably ARE...

I will see if i can dig up the articles

This is good news. But grab it up now before the FDA outlaws it if you live in the US. We know they don`t want something like this around.

When I was a youngster a long ago, I remember if somebody said they had a wart, an elder would say, "Can I buy it from you for a penny?" After explaining that the wart would go away once it was purchased, the one with the wart, usually, a child or youngster, agreed and would take the penny. My understand is that technique worked because the youngster believed it would work. "Power of suggestion" some would say.

reply to post by Aliensun


I do believe the power of suggestion is more likely in the young. My grandma is supposed to have a "gift" for removing warts. She says it's a trick passed down from her mother. Basically, she cuts an onion in half and uses one half to rub on the wart a certain number of times and hides the other piece. She says that she "talks to the onion" and the warts go away. She isn't allowed to tell the "patient" what she says to the onion because she says it wont work, otherwise. Yes, my grandma, the onion whisperer, is a little out there, but I've seen many warts cured by this woman!

When I was little, I was a warty little thing. I mean, I had them everywhere. I had one large one on my right knee and little bitty ones around it, on my wrists, hands, fingers, toes... you name it. She did her magic onion trick, told me not to think about the warts and within weeks, they were gone... completely gone, and without scars. She did the same for other people, but I did notice, over the years, that it worked better on younger people.

My warts stayed away, until I was 30 and then a tiny one formed on my left, index finger. It's tiny and flat... can barely see it and not at all unless you're looking. I always wondered if it was something in the onion that made the warts go away, so I rubbed an onion on it myself. It didn't work. So, I got my grandma to do it again. Still didn't work. So, this leads me to believe it is more the power of suggestion. I believed it when I was young (about seven, I believe) so it worked. When I got older, I had thought and wondered about it too much and the power of suggestion no longer worked for me.

Anyway, on topic:

Would be nice if milkweed could be used as skin cancer preventative. Lord knows we're plagued with it here in the boonies, during the summer. My father died of melanoma when he was only 24 (I know milkweed doesn't treat melanoma anyway, but...) I've been the sunscreen queen, since I was old enough to take care of myself, but now that I have kids and slather them in it, I read up on the ingredients of sunscreen and it's scary! I like the natural ones, but it's hard to find natural ones with staying power... granted milkweed probably doesn't have staying power either. I'm thinking out loud here so I'm going to shut up, lol.

reply to post by gemineye


Haha...the good ole onion.

My grandma was a wart whisperer too! I think I wrote about it on another thread here once upon a time. In a nutshell, take a silk thread, touch the wart, tie a knot, hold the knot to your lips and whisper, "you will be gone (rough translation), repeat if needed with a knot per wart, and then bury the thread outside at the NW corner of the house. Tell the person that when the thread rots, the warts will be gone.

Sorry about your dad. That's way too young to loose someone that important from our lives.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


I hadn't heard that one! Maybe I'll try it and become a wart whisperer myself, one of these days, ha ha!

And thank you. My dad had a mole on his shoulder that he'd had most of his life. Not too long after a major sunburn, it started doing weird things, but he just let it go. By the time he finally got it checked out, it was too late and he didn't last very much longer. I can remember him though, even though I was only four at the time, so that helps, even though it was a bad situation. My younger sister can remember him, but can't remember actually seeing him or talking to him or anything and my mother was still pregnant with my youngest sister when he passed away so I'm the fortunate one. I do feel bad for my sisters though.

reply to post by gemineye

So sad about your dad...an existing mole, eh? That's very scary. They do say watch for changes as well as new ones.

By the way, here's some information about the weed rapunzel referred to:

The Devil's apple, or Solanum linnaeanum has an active ingredient which shows early promise as a cancer treatment. www.cosmosmagazine.com...

"more open" fulltext pdf

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2133.2010.10184.x/abstract

The sap from Euphorbia peplus is effective against human nonmelanoma skin cancers

British Journal of Dermatology

Early View (Articles online in advance of print)

1. J.R. Ramsay1,
2. A. Suhrbier2,3,
3. J.H. Aylward4,
4. S. Ogbourne2,
5. S.-J. Cozzi2,
6. M.G. Poulsen1,
7. K.C. Baumann1,
8. P. Welburn4,
9. G.L. Redlich4,
10. P.G. Parsons2,3

Article first published online: 27 JAN 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2133.2010.10184.x

Author Information

1 Mater Radiation Oncology Centre, Brisbane, Qld, Australia
2 Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Post Office Royal Brisbane Hospital, Brisbane, Qld 4029, Australia
3 Griffith Medical Research College, Griffith University, Brisbane, Qld, Australia
4 Peplin Biotech Ltd, Brisbane, Qld, Australia

Summary

Background  The sap from Euphorbia peplus, commonly known as petty spurge in the U.K. or radium weed in Australia, has been used as a traditional treatment for a number of cancers.

Objective  To determine the effectiveness of E. peplus sap in a phase I/II clinical study for the topical treatment of basal cell carcinomas (BCC), squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) and intraepidermal carcinomas (IEC).

Methods  Thirty-six patients, who had refused, failed or were unsuitable for conventional treatment, were enrolled in a phase I/II clinical study. A total of 48 skin cancer lesions were treated topically with 100–300 μL of E. peplus sap once daily for 3 days.

Results  The complete clinical response rates at 1 month were 82% (n = 28) for BCC, 94% (n = 16) for IEC and 75% (n = 4) for SCC. After a mean follow-up of 15 months these rates were 57%, 75% and 50%, respectively. For superficial lesions < 16 mm, the response rates after follow-up were 100% for IEC (n = 10) and 78% for BCC (n = 9).

Conclusions  The clinical responses for these relatively unfavourable lesions (43% had failed previous treatments, 35% were situated in the head and neck region and 30% were > 2 cm in diameter), are comparable with existing nonsurgical treatments. An active ingredient of E. peplus sap has been identified as ingenol mebutate (PEP005). This clinical study affirms community experience with E. peplus sap, and supports further clinical development of PEP005 for the treatment of BCC, SCC and IEC.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


Dandelions are superfoods, yet we are told to buy round-up and kill them weeds. Whatever "they" want you to do ask your self why. Don't kill the dandelions, eat them. They are full of vitamins. Not even organic vegetables have the amount of nutrients and vitamins that wild foods ( or as we have been brainwashed to call them ) weeds have. Educate yourselves about wildfoods before you call me a hippie freak!!!

reply to post by jjjtir

More good "weeds." Very good to know. Thank you.

reply to post by the2people

Haha I've eaten dandelions and had dandelion wine too. Yum. The hippies had the right idea.

very interesting i'll have to save this info

I think this is great but from someone who has had a skin cancer removed, you don't know it's a Melanoma or not until AFTER it's removed and tests are done on the tissue.
I would hate to think that some people will read this and think they can self diagnose themselves, use this weed when in actual fact that they could have a quickly advancing Melanoma and not know it.

I took absolutely no pharma for my skin cancer. Just had it cut out. End of story.

reply to post by Flighty

That's very, very good advice. Self-diagnosing is very risky, and it would be wise to take this path only while also being under medical supervision. I too have been through this and chose to take no "drugs." Just had it cut out and followed up with laser treatments and some natural remedies (not this one...yet). So far, so good.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


good news about your health. I've had no other skin cancers surface either.
Yeah definately in tandum with some medical assistance. Like I said Melanomas have such a fast growth rate (mainly under the skin surface where you can't see) and it doesn't take long for it to become terminal.

I really hope that skin cancer doctors get hold of this info and use it with their patients.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


Another great wild food (weed) for skin cancer and warts is the prickly lettuce, just break the stem and there is a white milky liquid which you apply directly on to the skin problem and it will eat it, it contains small amounts of opium for pain releif. Smart plant!
Another wild food super food for preventing and treating cancer is "Burdock Root." This is a very strong blood and skin cleanser.
Don't kill the weeds - wild foods - eat them!!!!!!

Originally posted by davespanners
I'm so bored of this obsession with categorizing every single thing on earth as either causing or curing cancer, I'm starting to get the feeling that someone is just going through the dictionary at this point and assigning a random cause / cure value.

We've had M for milkweed today and O for Oral sex.... so next up should be Pancakes

edit on 26-1-2011 by davespanners because: (no reason given)

Ha!

In fact plenty of people have noticed the Daily Fail's obsession with cancer:

Help to make sense of the Daily Mail's ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.

here is the full A-Z list (very long!):

kill-or-cure.heroku.com...

Someone has even made a song about it:

www.youtube.com...

Confusingly, quite a few things, including alcohol, kill and cure cancer. Apparently. Watch out though, a lightbulbs give you cancer!