Self Improvement

Science Confirms Turmeric As Effective As 14 Drugs

turmeric
Comments (1)
  1. Annette Ingram says:

    Here’s a great example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing!! This article is headed, ” SCIENCE CONFIRMS TURMERIC AS EFFECTIVE AS 14 DRUGS”. The unadorned truth is that SCIENCE confirms no such thing.

    What the evangelical authors of this paper have chosen not to tell you is that the so-called ‘evidence’ refers to studies in which turmeric was NOT given as an oral supplement in the same way as the 14 drugs are given. There are NO STUDIES which compare the herb with any drug using the same criteria for comparison.

    Both ‘TRUTH INSIDE OF YOU’ and ‘GREEN MED INFO’ it quotes from list a series of non-clinical studies where turmeric or curcumin (its active compound ) are added to human cells in petri dishes or test tubes on lab benches. This is NOT equivalent to having you swallow the turmeric. They quote from other studies where the curcumin is injected into the abdomen of animals – again not equivalent.

    Why are such lab bench and animal studies irrelevant? Because the curcumin has a bioavailability of only 1%. That means that for every 100 mg you swallow, only 1 mg gets into your cells. It has been validated that a daily dose of 8,000 mg of curcumin is required to be even detected in a human bloodstream and at that level, still none gets into human cells in brain tissue or liver or joints or anywhere else.

    Curcumin doesn’t easily get into human (or animal) cells because it is a big bulky molecule that is just too big to get through the openings in cells.

    The ONLY clinical evidence that curcumin/turmeric is clinically effective in humans is in disorders of the digestive tract. That’s because there is only one membrane separating the contents of the digestive tract and the intestinal cell. Even so, very large doses are required for this herb to have a measurable clinical benefit.

    The 2013 study that compared Turmeric with Prozac is often quoted by the curcumin evangelists. The quotes typically suggest that Turmeric is equivalent to Prozac in its effect on severe depression – a very dangerous and unfounded claim!

    One only has to look at the first page of the original research to see that the researchers themselves state their result were ‘not statistically significant’. There are numerous other flaws in the study but their own admission that the study has no findings of value should be enough to convince you. It is the science journalists we can blame for spreading this sensationalised nonsense!

    Before anyone throws accuses me of representing Big Pharma, let me say that I am quite the opposite, being a trained clinician in Herbal Medicine – however, as a scientist, I abhor the sort of rubbish I read in articles like this one!

    What’s really needed on this site is a large dose of critical thinking!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *