Curcumin—A 'Universal' Cancer Treatment

Interestingly, curcumin appears to be universally useful for just about every type of cancer, which is really odd since cancer consists of a wide variety of different molecular pathologies. You wouldn't necessarily suspect that there would be one herb that would work for most of them. Dr. LaValley explains how he came to this conclusion:

"I went back to the literature and looked at how I can support the decision-making process and the recommendations that I'm making for treatment from the scientific literature, including literature that goes from the treatment of humans with oral products like pharmaceuticals or natural products.

This is where I learned about this molecule called curcumin, all the way down to its use in animals and then its use in test tubes or petri dish... One of the amazing things about curcumin is that this molecule has some profound anti-inflammatory activity and has activity in many molecular targets.

There are molecules that are in the cells, and those molecules interact with each other along certain pathways or tracks. The traffic of that interaction, the signals that are transferred in that trafficking of information in the molecules, presents many different targets or molecular-specific complexes."

As explained by Dr. LaValley, whether the curcumin molecule causes an increase in traffic or activity of a particular molecular target, or a decrease/inhibition of activity, studies repeatedly show that the end result is a potent anti-cancer activity. Furthermore, curcumin does not adversely affect healthy cells, suggesting it selectively targets cancer cells. Research has also shown that it works synergistically with certain chemotherapy drugs, enhancing the elimination of cancer cells.