Researchers claim that a common weed could help treat skin cancers. The sap taken from a plant called milkweed or petty spurge, found by roadsides, when applied to the skin can kill certain forms of skin cancers. This works on non-melanoma skin cancers, which affects millions of people each year.
The common garden weed has been used for centuries as a conventional folk drug to cure conditions like asthma, warts and certain forms of skin cancer. However, for the first time research team from Australia conducted a clinical trial of sap from Euphorbia peplus which is associated with Euphorbia plants.
Among forty-eight non-melanoma lesions, thirty-six patients which included BCC-basal cell carcinomas, IES- intraepidermal carcinomas and SCC- squamous cell carcinomas, development of tumourous cells restricted to outer layer of the skin. Those patients were treated once a day for three successive days by an oncologist using a cotton swab to apply sufficient of the E.peplus sap to cover the surface of each lesion.
The preliminary outcomes were inspiring, after only one month forty-one out of forty-eight tumours had gone completely. The patients who had left with some lesions were proffered second phase of treatment. Subsequent to fifteen months of treatment, two third of forty-eight skin cancers lesions were still showing absolute reaction.
The lesions commonly appear on the body parts which are exposed to the sun like head, neck, ears and back of the hands. The side-effects of the treatment were low with forty-three percent of patients reported no pain as a result of the treatment and only fourteen percent reported modest pain.
In all cases of successful treatment the skin was left with a good cosmetic manifestation. The benefits were attributed to active constituent ingenol mebutate that has been shown to annihilate cancerous cells. Further studies are required and people should not try this at home because weed sap can be harmful to the eyes and should not be eaten.