ALOE VERA
USING IT TO PREVENT, TREAT AND BEAT CANCER FOLLOW RIC COGGINS’ JOURNEY THROUGH CANCER…
M
RIC COGGINS
ost of us have or have had aloe vera plants at one time or another. They make great house plants and in warm enough areas, great garden foliage that can survive long periods of little water. Aloe plants are a member of the lily/onion family, and is thought that they likely originated in Africa, before spreading throughout the world.
The first known written reports on the nourishing juice of the aloe vera plant reach as far back as 6,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. Knowledge of aloe vera’s pharmaceutical properties were recorded in Sumerian clay tablets in 1750 B.C. Mentions of aloe are included in the Bible and in the legends of ancient kings and queens. We even know that Alexander the Great was persuaded by Aristotle to conquer the island of Socotra (now a part of Yemen) where aloe was cultivated, in order to have aloe vera to treat his soldiers. In Roman times, physician and naturalist Dioscorides recommended the use of aloe for numerous physical disorders, such as the treatment of wounds, gastrointestinal discomforts, gingivitis, arthralgia, skin irritation, sunburn, acne, hair loss and others. Today we are probably most familiar with aloe vera’s ability to remarkably speed up our healing from sunburns, whether in rubbing the gel of a freshly cut leaf on the burned skin area or in using a commercially prepared product which has
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greenliving | March 2020
aloe added to it for increased effectiveness. Along those same lines, aloe vera’s benefit when added to cosmetic and haircare products is well known and universally understood. But did you know that it has been used successfully in helping patients with cancer fight and overcome that disease? Like many of you, I have had aloe vera in my gardens for decades, and everyone in my family has been treated with it at one time or another for skin burns and sunburns. In the ’80s, I suffered third-degree burns on one of my hands when an oxyacetylene welding torch exploded. Of course, due to the severity of my injuries, I sought treatment from an allopathic burn trauma facility. However, in addition to the conventional treatments they applied, I also placed freshly filleted aloe leaves from my garden on my badly burned hand. Amazingly, today no one would know this story unless I told them, as I healed without scarring to my hand. I’ll bet you cannot tell which hand I burned if you looked. I learned about aloe vera’s healing powers with cancer from Chris Wark, whom I have written about before. Wark used aloe vera juice in 2004 to help cure his colon cancer. He remains cancer-free today, some 16 years later. Today he is the father of two girls—two girls whom he would likely never have had due to sterility likely induced by conventional treatments of chemo and radiation, which he avoided by using diet and supplements, including aloe vera gel. So does aloe vera cure cancer? No, as such, it does not. But it does provide remarkable support to something that does cure cancer… the human immune system. As I have written in the greenlivingaz.com
