Fancy a curry, a spicy sausage or a handful of herbs with your halibut and chips? These won’t just tickle your taste buds they could also save your life.
Exaggeration? Maybe. Fabrication? Definitely not . . . not since a woman in England was cured of blood cancer by dosing herself up with turmeric.
The reversion of her incurable illness has been verified by the doctors who were treating her and is the first confirmed case of its kind.
If you are one of the GPs looking for a new placement on s1jobs, you may already have had a stream of patients in your surgery asking about turmeric in the hope it might help them too.
It’s a bit too early to say for sure if the results can be replicated but what is known is many plants are already being used to treat serious illnesses.
Take Tamoxifen, the breast cancer treatment. Did you know it is made from yew trees and gardeners across the country are paid money by drugs companies for the clippings removed during the annual trim of their yew hedges?
Plant sterols have long been an ingredient of yogurts and spreads promoted for their ability to lower cholesterol.
In Sweden the country’s woeful record on heart disease was overturned by persuading the nation to eat lots of berries.
As cures go, that’s pretty tasty and one Scotland, home to the best raspberries and strawberries in the world and covered in juicy brambles that every September are free for the picking, could do well to replicate among its nutritionists and health workers.
More recently the secret of the longevity of the residents of Okinawa has been revealed: it’s the purple yam that makes up the largest part of their diet.
Apparently, any other purple food would work just as well if people could be persuaded to eat enough of it and as red cabbage, beetroot and black grapes are sold in every supermarket, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get more of the dark stuff into our diet.
The tricky part is persuading patients who expect a prescription for pills to change their eating habits. But that’s what’s needed because most of the so-called ‘miracle’ foods are out there don’t work like turmeric.
Instead they can work to help stop disease from developing in the first place.
Not contracting a serious illness is never going to make the headlines in the same way as being dramatically cured of one, but it’s got to be worth chewing on a few blackberries and radishes to ensure this happens.
For the tastiest vacancies in the Medical world visit s1jobs.