Obligatory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1217/There are some studies that suggest that certain chalcones when applied to cancer cells in a petri dish can kill them, and some when concentrated and fed to mice in doses you wouldn't get from just eating the plants improved their survival time (with only basic study on what other damage such a regime might have done - and one should note that mouse physiology, while useful for study, is not the same as human). That said, you're not hurting anything giving her a bit of ashitaba, so if it makes her feel better without giving false hope that's going to come back to bite her, then go for it. Honestly, if I was in your situation, I'd probably be doing the same desperate search.
That said, what's being studied isn't just eating the plants - it's the highly concentrated, refined ethanol extract of the roots. In in-vivo mouse studies they used 2 kilograms of crushed, dried roots and 50% ethanol to extract a solution (vacuum dried down to 200 grams), then take the portion of that which dissolves in ethyl acetate (vacuum dried down to 50 grams), then go through a series of progressive steps to isolate the specific chemicals they wanted, down to the milligram level. They fed the various extracts and individual chemicals to mice at varying rates.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.11256/abstractSo if you want to use her as a guinea pig and she wants that too, go ahead. If we want to go with the simplest as an analogy (the whole ethanol extract), for a 60kg human to match the mouse's dose of 500mg/kg of concentrated root extract per day would have to eat 300 grams (almost a pound) of dry roots per day (ideally uncooked, you don't know if heat would denature the compounds). The undried weight would be significantly higher; carrots, for example, are 87% water, so if we assume the same ratio here, then that's 2,3 kilograms of fresh roots per day (5 pounds). So that's your baseline. Given that it's unrealistic to eat that much, and all of the furanocoumarins wouldn't be healthy either, you're either going to have to cut the dosage dramatically from what was used in the study, or perform some level of extracting and refining. The ethanol extraction probably wouldn't be too difficult and the concentrate (I'm assuming here that the choice of air drying vs. vacuum drying doesn't make a difference) would only be 30 grams per day. That is to say, your recipe would be, every day:
1) Grind 300 grams of dried ashitaba root in a food processor
2) Soak it in 1/5 liter (a bit under a cup) of vodka for 1 hour
3) Drain and press out all of the liquid you can (a press would help).
4) Repeat steps #2 and #3 two additional times.
5) Let all the vodka dry until you're left with about 30 grams of a dark greenish brown, viscous extract (about 3 tablespoons)
Contrarily, if she wanted to get drunk she could chug it without letting it fully dry
Note: I've never priced ashitaba root but I'm sure this would be expensive.
That said, do realize that any sort of alternative treatment, if it works, is also going to be a form of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is poisonous chemicals that cause cell death, chosen for properties that make them kill cancer cells at a higher rate than normal cells; however, no chemical is perfectly selective. And it's very unlikely that one's going to stumble into an as-of-yet undiscovered plant that bears a perfectly selective chemical that applies universally to all cancers. But if - and I stress IF - the human body responds the same as the mice in the study, the it looks very promising; it didn't just shrink tumors but significantly improved survival times and their bodies appeared to be healthier in general. But again, we really don't know the potential side effects or how well it works on humans instead of mice.
Topic: Anti cancer Ashitaba, Angelica Keiskei (Read 4019 times)