 Aloe vera is one of the most popular home remedies in use today, yet most physicians know little about it. In fact, most dismiss it as useless, while their patients firmly believe in its healing properties. The usual tendency of most doctors is to dismiss as useless any popular remedy that can be purchased without a prescription. However, the aloe plant deserves a closer look, because, surprising as it may seem, there may be a scientific basis for some of its uses. It has, after all, been used additionally for thousands of years by a number of ancient civilizations. Only recently, though, has it been put to the test. But the tests have been like finding out if you can use aloe to ameliorate the damage of albino rat testicles, or affecting the cholesterol and estrogen responses in juvenile goldfish. Yes, if you inject aloe into the bloodstream of rats, their blood pressure drops, but if you feed it to people, it doesn't appear to have any blood pressure lowering effect. In rats, drinking aloe causes colorectal tumors to form, whereas it appears to have anti-inflammatory effects on human intestinal lining in a petri dish. But when you put it to the test for irritable bowel syndrome, no benefit was found from proving symptoms or quality of life. In IBS patients, what about IBD, inflammatory bowel disease? No benefit found there, either. What about the beneficial effects of aloe in wound healing? Evidently so miraculous as to seem more like myth than fact. Works when you slice open guinea pigs, or when you try to frost bite off the ears of bunny rabbits, but in people may make things worse, aloe causing a delay in wound healing. 21 women were studied who had wound complications after having a caesarean or other abdominal surgery, healing on their own in an average of 53 days, whereas the wounds treated with aloe vera gel required 83 days, 50% longer. They thought it would help based on the animal research, but when put to the test in people, it failed. At this point in my research, it was looking like the only benefit to aloe was to improve the quality of cheap beef burgers. But what about burns? Aloe has been used to treat burns since antiquity, but in their ageless wisdom, they were also applying excrement to burns, so I wouldn't put too much faith in ancient medical traditions. That's why we have science. What's the effectiveness of aloe vera gel compared with silver sulfidiazine as burn wound dressings in second-degree burns? The introduction of topical antimicrobial agents has resulted in a significant reduction in burn mortality, and the most commonly used is this silver sulfidiazine. Unfortunately, it may delay wound healing and become toxic to the kidneys and bone marrow, so they tried it head to head against topical aloe gel, and the aloe burns healed 50% faster, and the pain went away about 30% quicker. The researchers conclude that aloe has remarkable efficacy in the treatment of burn injuries. Anyone see the flaw in that logic, though? What was this study missing? Right up a placebo control group. Why? Because I just told you that one of the side effects of the drug is delayed wound healing, so maybe the aloe worked better just because it wasn't delaying healing, but wouldn't have worked better than just nothing. When put to the test against nothing, aloe vera and vaseline versus the vaseline alone, the aloe really did seem to help, speeding healing by about a third, and indeed put all the studies together, and aloe does appear to significantly speed up the healing of second-degree burns. Okay, but blistering burns are thankfully less common than just like sunburns, where your skin just turns red. What is the efficacy of aloe vera in the prevention treatment of sunburn? An aloe vera cream was applied 30 minutes before, immediately after, and both before and after, burning people with a UV lamp, and surprisingly the aloe appeared to offer no sunburn protection and had no efficacy in sunburn treatment when compared to placebo. But hey, at least it worked for blistering burns, so should we keep some aloe vera gel in the medicine cabinet? The problem is that aloe vera at the store may have no aloe vera at all. Oh, they say they have aloe vera as the first or second ingredient, but are apparently lying. See, there's no watchdog assuring that aloe products are what they say they are. That means suppliers are on an honor system, and when health and nutrition are mixed with profit, honor, too often, goes out the window.