 Medicine is messy. One of the reasons researchers experiment on animals is that they can create uniform standardized injuries to test potential remedies. It's not like you can just cut open 50 people and see if something works better than a sugar pill. But wait a second, we cut people open all the time. It's called surgery. The efficacy of turmeric curcumin in pain and post-operative fatigue after laparoscopic colisestectomy, people getting their gallbladder removed. A double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled study. 50 people were cut into given curcumin or an identical-looking placebo along with rescue analgesics actual painkillers to take if the pain becomes unbearable. Even though it's just laparoscopic surgery, people don't realize what a toll it can take. It can be out of commission for a month. In India, turmeric and curry powder has traditionally been used as a remedy for traumatic pain and fatigue, so let's put it to the test. In the weeks following surgery, a dramatic drop in pain and fatigue scores in the term of pigment group, the curcumin group. Those are my kind of p-values. It's hard to come up with objective measures of pain and fatigue, but drug-wise, the curcumin group was still in so much pain. They were forced to take seven of the rescue painkillers. In the same time period, though, the control group had to take 39. Of course, better to not get gallstones in the first place, but their conclusion was like no other I've ever read in a drug trial. Turmeric is a natural food ingredient, palatable and harmless, so far so good. It proves to be beneficial, as it may be an eco-friendly alternative to synthesize anti-inflammatory drugs, which have a definite carbon footprint due to industrial production. Since when do surgeons care about the greenhouse gas emissions from drug companies? I just had to look up this reference. And there it is, the journey of the carbon literate and climate conscious endosurgeon. I don't know what's strange, you're seeing the word holistic in a surgical journal, or the name of this guy's practice, Dr. Agarwal's surgery and yoga.