Everyone has probably heard of black cumin oil. But few have had to deal with the seeds. And they are the most important! As it turns out, you can have an excellent and very effective therapy costing literally a few pounds a month.
Let’s look at Hashimoto’s disease, where patients were given 2 grams of ground nigella seeds, split into 2 tablets of 1 gram each, or a placebo:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1876382016300208?via%3Dihub
The results were sensational!
ATPO dropped from about 300 to about 150, by half! TSH also dropped, from 6.5 to 4. T3 and T4 hormones went up, but not by much. All parameters related to inflammation have dropped.
Unfortunately, this is not a cure that allows us to get rid of the problem completely, but for the price of about $1 per month we have a “therapy” that allows us to keep the disease under control. Medicine is not able to offer anything even remotely approaching this effectiveness for a similar price.
A look at the effects of a similar therapy for rheumatoid arthritis:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4884216/
There were no such fireworks here, but 2 doses of 500 mg of black cumin oil significantly reduced pro-inflammatory activity while increasing anti-inflammatory activity. They did not measure there how it would affect the course of the disease itself, but it is certain that there was some positive effect.
The oil has also been proven effective at a similar dose for hay fever and sinusitis:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20947211/
The effect was virtually complete resolution of symptoms in the study group, compared to the placebo group. There was also improvement in all laboratory parameters tested, such as IgE and eosinophil levels.
Other hay fever studies have produced similar results.
In the treatment of obesity in men, it prevented a drop in testosterone levels:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20724766/
It helped with ulcerative colitis, but the effect was very small:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30666747/
It’s not entirely clear what the effects might be yet. In rat studies, it was able to prevent the development of demyelinating autoimmune diseases, which opens up the potential for a study in multiple sclerosis. Let’s face it, in rats, nigella cured experimentally induced multiple sclerosis. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the identical effect will be in humans, as experimental diseases in animals sometimes vary quite a bit, but the fact remains.
It had a very clear positive effect on the course of diabetes in humans:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31817324/
It reduced anxiety quite markedly, and also increased intellectual potential as expressed by progress on tests:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24412554/
However, these were not results that could be described as a “complete cure” or a “surge of genius”. Perhaps if a higher dose had been used, the effects would have been more pronounced; only half a gram of ground grain was used.
Preliminary studies with animals also suggest anti-cancer potential, but here one must always look with caution. Sometimes there is indeed a curative effect, but for example, it requires doses equivalent to drinking several liters of oil a day. Until there are at least studies in which animals were given a certain dose of oil or seeds to eat, not much can be said.
We have a very promising study where cumin extract was used, but it was injected into a tumor:
https://www.scielo.br/j/bjmbr/a/Zs57kV9Lt8J4PB4ZHbLkR8b/?lang=en#
The effects were really very good. The mortality rate in the high-dose group dropped to zero, and there were no tumors in the group. In the low-dose group, there were 7 times fewer tumors than in the group that did not get the extract, and the mortality rate was also many times lower.
In the group that didn’t get the therapy, the size of the tumor increased tenfold, in both groups that got the extract the tumors shrank at the beginning and they didn’t grow during the whole experiment.
But you have to remember that first of all this was only for one type of tumor, secondly the therapy consisted of injections, thirdly the course of the disease in mice and in humans can be quite different and there were many drugs that completely cured animals without having any effect in humans afterwards.
Are there any side effects? Are there groups of patients who should not take nigella under any circumstances? It is hard to say. It is obvious that people with a nigella allergy should not take it, but this is a truism. One may wonder whether too much suppression of the inflammatory reaction will not have a serious impact on the functioning of the body, for example, on the defense against infections. So far, studies have shown nothing of the sort, but it is important to keep an eye on the pulse.