 For a half century, aloe vera gel processors and distributors armed with biblical quotes and anecdotal testimonials have sought recognition for their products. Too often accompanied, however, by misinformation, and none of which more elaborate than promoting aloe vera for the treatment of cancer. But check out this recent case report, a 64-year-old Hispanic woman with a tumor on her eyeball, which looked like a classic case of ocular surface squamous neoplasia, a type of eye cancer, and therefore surgery was recommended to remove it. But the patient declined the surgery and instead initiated the use of concentrated aloe vera eyedrops three times a day based on a friend's suggestion. Just some off-the-shelf aloe vera gel product. And to the doctor's surprise, the lesion showed significant improvement after just one month, and two months later it went from this to gone completely. At the time of writing was six years later and appeared the cancer was gone and stayed gone. Now normally you'd go in and cut it out with wide margins to make sure you get it all, because despite the best efforts of the ocular surgeon, recurrence rates as high as worse than a flip of a coin have been reported because there's little bits of cancer you miss on surgery. And here there's this tumor that disappeared without surgery. Are we sure it was cancerous though? Well, she refused a biopsy, so we don't know for certain. However, it did have all that kind of defining characteristics, and so to see it disappear without any side effects and stay gone is pretty extraordinary. Surgical resection still remains the recommended treatment, but at least there's an option for patients to try if they don't want to go down that route. Of course, this was just a single case report, no control group. It's not like she had tumors in both eyes and just tried the allo on one. There was a controlled study suggesting allo could prolong survival in those with advanced untreatable cancer, but it wasn't a randomized controlled study. But a decade later there was hundreds of patients with metastatic cancer randomized to receive chemotherapy with or without allo. And the allo group had three times the number of complete responses, significantly greater objective tumor responses, and two-thirds at some level of disease control compared to only half in the non-allo group. But does that translate out into improved survival? Yes. For example, a one-year 70% of the allo group was still alive, whereas most of the non-allo group was dead. And as a bonus, the chemo was better tolerated in the allo group, less fatigue, for example, and better maintenance of their immune system. So given the better disease control, given the better survival, this study seems to suggest that allo may be a successful add-on therapy in terms of both tumor regression rate and survival time. Now this was a randomized controlled study, but not a randomized placebo controlled study. It's not like the control group was getting some fake allo drink. So some of the tumor response may have been like a mind-over-matter placebo effect. Now there are potential downsides. As I explained in a previous video, swallowing allo can, in rare cases, trigger liver inflammation and cause electrolyte imbalances due to diarrhea or vomiting. For example, there was a case reported of an allo-induced low potassium in a patient with breast cancer, which rapidly resolved when she stopped the allo, thought due to the laxative effect allo can have. If you want to talk to your doctor about giving it a try, note this was not allo vera, but allo arboricens, a tree-like allo that can grow to be like 10 feet tall. The concoction they made was a mixture of about two-thirds of a pound of fresh allo leaves to a pound of honey, plus about three tablespoons of 40% alcohol, given orally at a dose of two teaspoons, three times a day, starting six days prior to the onset of chemo.