One of the reasons curcumin has gained a reputation as a “cure-all” is its clinical application in the treatment of cancer. Curcumin hasn’t just been used to treat cancer by the alternative medicine crowd. Curcumin has also been tested in conventional clinical trials at mainstream medical research institutions such as the Baylor Hospital in Dallas, Texas, the University of Leicester Hospitals in the UK, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
There are over 1,970 (and rising) studies on the use of curcumin in treating cancer in people, not just laboratory animals. But even with the enormous knowledge about the usefulness of curcumin in treating cancer, it’s not safe to assume that curcumin is always the answer for this disease.
Curcumin’s cancer-fighting ability is best demonstrated for skin cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and liver cancer. Even for these kinds of cancer, there are stages in the disease that curcumin may be very helpful, and stages when it is not. In colon cancer, there are two stages during which curcumin supplements are helpful, and one stage in which curcumin actually protects the cancer from the effects of treatment.
Curcumin is not just used to treat cancer. It is also used to prevent it. Here the evidence is even better than the evidence for curcumin as a cancer treatment, but not everyone needs the same amount of curcumin, not even everyone with the same kind of cancer.
The articles in this section are written to help you learn about the research that has been done, when curcumin can help and when it cannot. The articles get a little technical, but if you have had cancer, you probably had a lot of learning to do to understand your treatment.
In 90% of cancer cases, curcumin can help. It’s just not the only thing you should do to support and sustain remission from cancer. Use curcumin as a supplement to conventional cancer care, not as an alternative to it, to get better results faster and to stay healthy longer than with conventional care alone.