Saw Palmetto Herbal Remedy for Prostate Cancer – Does It Work?

Saw Palmetto Herbal Remedy for Prostate Cancer:

It has been generally accepted, especially by many in the herbal remedy groups that Saw Palmetto as a herbal solution for prostate cancer works.

We have even talked about it in other herbal-remedy related articles on this website. But we just found out now that some scientists have carried out tests and concluded that Saw Palmetto is actually no different from a placebo.

Read the rest of the news article below:

Scientists investigating a popular herbal treatment for enlarged prostate, saw palmetto, have concluded it is no more effective than a placebo.

That conclusion comes from a study which included hundreds of men in their forties and older.

As men age, the prostate gland often gets larger. The prostate surrounds the urethra, which carries urine from the bladder to the penis. An enlarged prostate can impede the flow of urine, causing a variety of symptoms.

There are prescription drugs which can ease symptoms, but many men prefer the “natural” alternative: an extract from the saw palmetto tree, native to the American Southeast.

“It’s actually a very complex extract. It has quite a number of different chemicals and molecules within it, several of which are plausible agents to affect the way a man urinates, to even shrink the prostate,” says Gerald L. Andreiole of Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, who co-authored a paper on the study.

The men in the study were randomly assigned to two groups – one got progressively larger doses of saw palmetto; the other group got a placebo – a dummy pill. It was a double-blind study – neither the participants nor staff knew who was getting which.

They filled out a standard questionnaire used by urologists to assess prostate enlargement. It includes questions like, “How many times did you need to get up [to urinate] at night, how often did you experience frequency, urgency, the sense of incomplete bladder emptying. This is a standard symptom score that has been used for close to 20 years.”

By the end of the study, after about 16 months, Andriole says the symptom scores improved for both groups of men. “But there was no difference in the magnitude of symptom score improvement between placebo and saw palmetto.” Read more here.

The good thing, though, is that it’s not harmful in itself. It’s just the fact that some people might decide not to go for further treatments while taking such herbal remedies… while the condition gets worse, unknown to them. I hope you learned something from this news article on Saw Palmetto Herbal Remedy for Prostate Cancer.

Prostate Cancer Natural Treatment

Nature’s cures are often always the best in the treatment of several diseases, especially since they mostly do not have any side effects worthy of mentioning; except that most people are unaware of nature’s secrets, so that they don’t know what to look for. Thankfully in the treatment of prostate cancer, conventional medicine is finding that only so much is really understood medically, and they are now forced to look at what provisions nature has made for such instances, and boy the things they have found!

Running through a short list, vitamins from various vegetable and fruit sources have been found to have healing properties against prostate cancer, and may actually prevent the disease. For one thing, they certainly contribute to a lowered incidence of prostate cancer amongst those who feed more on them than on high fat meals, red meat, and processed foods.

Lycopene, for instance, a very powerful antioxidant that is found in tomatoes, watermelons, and some other red pigmented vegetables and fruit is already confirmed to at least lower prostate cancer risk by about 35% in men who consume certain portions of it daily.

In an interesting twist, fish oils have been found to also have health values against prostate cancer. In specific, polyunsaturated fatty acids omega-3 and omega-6 that are found richly in various forms of fish (especially the tuna and the salmon) are now believed to be able to contribute to a reduced incidence of the disease. For that reason, some scientists say that a vegan diet that allows for a little fish would be ideal for preventing prostate cancer, and can certainly help slow PSA doubling times in patients with the disease.

Prostate cancer is not believed to be curable after a certain stage, but it was recently found that capsaicin, an ingredient in red peppers that were harvested in South America, and that is abundant in various other species of the spice, can cause advanced prostate cancer cells to undergo programmed cell death or apoptosis. Even though this has not been concluded in findings, there is no telling the excitement about the discovery – for all that is known it may be the cure for the disease.

Various other natural treatments for prostate cancer  or disorders actually can help in the treatment of prostate cancer as well. The saw palmetto, well known for its medicinal value against BPH is one of them; the saw palmetto is another; a third is green tea; and fourth comes pomegranate – specifically pomegranate juice. Besides the fact that several doctors urge them now for patients undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, there is the reasoning that if they can aid in treating prostate disorders, they can aid in treating prostate cancer as well.

Dietary Supplements For A Prostate Cancer Patient

Even at the earliest stages, when they are totally sure that they can cure you of prostate cancer, any cancer specialist doctor will still insist that you make some dietary changes to your eating habits to improve your chances of healing, and to reduce the possibly that your prostate cancer can relapse. This is no fluke because the foods you eat have a great deal of influence in the incidence of prostate cancer anywhere in the world.

A good example, one might suppose, is the higher incidence of prostate cancer in the industrialized nations of the West as against the incidence of the melanoma in Third World countries. For some reason, South America, Africa, and Asia do not suffer from prostate cancer as much as the United States, Canada, and certain parts of Europe do. Of course it is possible that there are various other environmental factors that might contribute to these statistics, but so far studies have strongly implicated treated foods and high calorie diets as contributory to the incidence of prostate cancer.

It is thereby no error of chance that diet is listed as a primary (casual) risk factor for prostate cancer; and in that light, you might want to pay attention to what the oncologist suggests and start to work on your diet. Better still, perhaps you should not wait until then before you get at it; instead you could begin right away and start to work on helping yourself live a longer healthier life in spite of your risk of prostate cancer, or diagnosis thereof.

First of all, you want to increase your intake of vitamin E, which is critical in forming red blood cells and muscles and tissues in your body. In addition, vitamin E has antioxidant properties that inhibit the dangerous oxidation of free radicals in your body that have been implicated as cancer causing agents. You will get your vitamin E abundant in vegetable oils, wheat germ, liver, and leafy green vegetables. You might also want to look around for sources of the mineral selenium, an element found in tiny amounts in plants and yeasts and associated with lowered risk of prostate cancer.

Lycopene is another dietary supplement that you should totally pick up because of its well known healing effects for prostate cancer patients. Also rich with antioxidant qualities, you will obtain it primarily from tomatoes, and you can also get lycopene from broccoli. You will need to work on your vitamin D sources as well, if you will hope to effectively cure yourself of prostate cancer. It is a mineral that essentially protects the body from the effects of low calcium intake and also lowers the risk of prostate cancer, while also lowering your PSA levels.

And while you are taking on all these new diet supplements for prostate cancer patient, you might want to do away with dairy, low-fat milk and other dairy products that have a vitamin A palmitate constituent. The substance has been shown to contribute to the risk of prostate cancer because it reacts with zinc and protein to form an unabsorbable complex. In the same breath, you want to do away with diets rich in animal fats, red meat, and high fat dairy products; what you need really is just a vegan diet, and some fish, and you will cure faster.

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