Relief with a Natural Product to help relieve Chemotherapy Side Effects - Ginger

This is nice, a natural ingredient that could offer relief to those going through treatment, although the article states to check with your physician first as there could even be side effects here with interference with blood clotting, but you would get side effects too potentially with a prescribed medication. Research like this is truly awakening and nice to see clinical and natural products with the potential to work together and the National Cancer Institute paid for the study too.

Ginger is also used with Sushi, to clean your palette between entrees too. BD

Ginger, long used as a folk Q remedy for soothing tummy aches, helped tame one of the most dreaded side effects of cancer treatment - nausea from chemotherapy, the first large study to test the herb for this has found.

People who started taking ginger capsules several days before a chemo infusion had fewer and less severe bouts of nausea afterward than others who were given dummy capsules, the federally funded study found.

"We were slightly beside ourselves" to see how much it helped, said study leader Julie Ryan of the University of Rochester in New York.

Results were released Thursday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be presented at the group's annual meeting later this month. Still, ginger capsules may offer a cheap, simple way to fight nausea, which is far more than just a quality-of-life issue, doctors say. Some cancer patients cut treatment short or refuse chemo altogether because of nausea, hurting their chances of beating the disease.

Patients took the capsules for six days, beginning three days before chemo treatment. They rated their nausea symptoms on a seven-point scale on the first day of each of three treatments.

All of the ginger doses significantly reduced nausea, and the middle and lowest doses gave the best results. Patients taking ginger scored their nausea an average of two or more points lower on the nausea scale, about a 40 percent improvement over their previous chemo treatments without ginger, Ryan said. Those given dummy pills reported hardly any difference.

Study: Ginger capsules ease chemotherapy nausea