Pouring the active ingredient in vinegar over a mesothelioma tumor has the same effect as pouring salt on a garden slug — it dissolves the mass into a harmless puddle of goo right before your eyes.
Research published in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology indicates that acetic acid applied directly to a mesothelioma tumor kills the cancer within minutes.
Healthy neighboring cells are vulnerable as well to acetic acid, but much less so — especially if it is administered with precision injections, the researchers observed.
The findings led the researchers to conclude that mesothelioma might be successfully treated using acetic acid by itself or in concert with chemotherapy.
Not Yet A Mesothelioma Therapy
Apparently, it doesn’t take much acetic acid to kill mesothelioma. A concentration of just 0.1 percent does the trick, but the researchers found that 0.5 percent induced cell death much faster.
Researchers with the Kyoto GI Disease Research Center in Japan and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway were the source of these discoveries but offered a few words of caution.
First, while acetic acid is contained in ordinary vinegar, it only accounts for about 3 percent of the product in your kitchen.
Since most of what’s in vinegar is water, you can’t try this trick at home — for it to work, you have to use pure acetic acid.
Also, you also have to apply the acetic acid directly to the tumor. Only your doctor can do that because it requires special equipment and skills.
Unfortunately, your doctor isn’t yet able to do this for you anyway because acetic acid has not been tested on humans in a clinical setting. The researchers only experimented with mesothelioma cells in a lab.
And if it’s determined that acetic acid can be safely used in you as a mesothelioma therapy, it will have to be administered with the greatest of care.
The researchers found in a previous study they performed that acetic acid can very quickly induce ulcers in tissues with which it comes into contact. So there will be very little room for error in using this stuff.
Mesothelioma Cell Death Theory
The researchers conducted their investigation into acetic acid by using mesothelioma cells culled from both rats and humans.
The specimens were kept in Petri dishes. This allowed easy observation of the effect of acetic acid once applied.
The researchers found that the acid doesn’t melt the cells but instead triggers their internal self-destruct mechanism. A disappointment for the researchers was their failure to satisfactorily explain how the acetic acid actually accomplishes that trick.
The researchers also couldn’t help but notice that mesothelioma cells were more vulnerable to acetic acid than were normal cells. They had no solid explanation for that, either.
The researchers wrapped up their report with a call for more studies to identify the molecular mechanism by which acetic acid induces cell death.
They nonetheless asserted that their discovery holds out hope for an eventual breakthrough of great clinical importance.
