GREECE’S RECENT frenzy over the alleged cancer-healing properties of olive tree leaves is almost three decades behind a similar epidemic in Cyprus, a leading oncologist said yesterday.
“We had a similar experience here in the late 70s to early 80s and it didn’t appear to do any good at all, except for the odd bout of diarrhoea in some patients,” Dr Helen Soteriou said.
“A man made a claim that because of olive trees’ longevity the power of long life was passed into its leaves and so was good for cancer. Patients believed him and started to take it.”
Soteriou said at the time doctors had allowed their patients to try the herbal remedy as long as they did not stop their ordinary treatment.
“Most of our patients continued with their treatments and the olive leaves didn’t appear to do any good at all. However, it certainly brought about the death of one patient who was suffering from Hodgkin’s at the time. She was at a curable stage but then skipped treatments [to try the olive leaves remedy] and subsequently died.”
Soteriou said patients always wanted to believe in the “nice things” and so preferred to believe in painless, easy olive leaves than the more unpleasant options of chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
She said: “Personally I think it’s rubbish. That’s not to say I’m dismissing ideas of herbal treatments because some of the most powerful drugs have been developed by pharmaceutical companies based on herbal remedies. It’s just that it requires evidence to make such a claim and you need to conduct serious research, involving hundreds of patients. This is called evidence based medicine.”
Costas Gregoriou, a horticulturalist at the Institute of Agricultural Research, added that no scientific research into the cancer-fighting properties of olive leaves had ever been carried out in Cyprus.
“Scientifically there is no such research to say olive leaves have anti-cancer properties and I don’t know of any other scientific evidence outside Cyprus that does,” the olive expert said.
A second horticulturalist in his department said: “To say something has anti-cancer properties you need to have human trials for several years. When a biochemical lab proves [something], to be scientifically correct you need to implement the method on the wider population.
“You also need to do this to determine if it could have negative effects on some other organ.”
She said she had heard that in Greece studies had been carried out on rabbits but that meant nothing if it wasn’t carried out on people.
“It’s an indication, but not evidence. You need to have tests on the wider population, otherwise it’s unreliable,” she said.
The furore in Greece broke out this week following extensive television coverage of the supposed healing powers of olive leaves.
The media purported that a thick, green drink made of raw olive leaves and water, mixed in a blender, was doing wonders for cancer patients with several elderly guests claiming to have been cured by the drink.
Within days supermarkets in Crete and Athens started stocking leaves, while television shows fielded hundreds of inquiries about the drink’s recipe, news reports said.
A Cypriot herbalist, who wished to remain unnamed, said that every civilisation had herbal cures for cancer but that if herbal remedies could truly cure the disease, everyone would be using it and everybody would be cured.
“The reason drugs companies charge so much for their products is because it takes years, and millions and millions of pounds, to research a product. You don’t think if olive leaves could cure cancer they’d have gone around collecting them and found a way to market them already,” he said.
He also said that although ordinarily harmless, if people went around picking leaves off trees and drinking them they could end up poisoning themselves as farmers used very powerful insecticides with which to spray olive trees.
The herb expert added that for centuries olive leaves been used as a standard herbal treatment to reduce blood pressure and heart disease but that didn’t necessarily mean it did.
“For example herbal teas are good for you, but they’re not held out to be cures,” he said.
He said the problem with making claims that herbs cured cancer was that cancer patients ended up believing in these claims and taking the herb to cure them.
He also said that perhaps one or two people would be inexplicably cured, but that the history of oncology was littered with unknown cures.
“But it’s definitely not by taking some herb. There are so many cancers. They are as diverse as raindrops. To say a herb will cure cancer it is very unwise and stupid,” he said.
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