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His students were reporting that they were being told this. “Wet table salt cures skin cancer”.
Fast forward to today… I was reading a book “Health at home, or, Hall's family doctor, by William Whitty Hall · 1876” and I read this;
Col. Ussery · 1876, of the parish of De Soto, in Louisiana(?), informs the editor of the Caddo Gazette, that he fully tested a remedy for this troublesome disease, recommended to him by a old Spanish woman, a native of the country had the reputation of curing cancers by making a salve of the yolk of an egg (the yellow part at the center of an egg);
The remedy is this: Take an Egg and break it; pour out the white, retaining the yolk in the shell; then put in Salt, and mix with the yolk as long as it will receive it; stir them together until a Salve is formed; put a portion of this on a piece of sticking-plaster by spreading a portion of it on linen or other material, and lay it over the spot and apply it to the cancer about twice a day. He has tried the remedy twice in his own family with complete success. This plaster must be renewed night and morning, until a cure is effected; the bowels being made to act freely every day.
Some I am thinking to myself, this is what Granny was telling me. Salt and Sea water is the oldest known form of medicine to human kind. Ever since man bathed in the ocean and noticed the some kind of skin rash was healed. Just google search “Sea Water Cure” and you will see my point.
Now if you investigate salt and it's use against cancer, you will find the following:
Salt for Skin Cancer: A new study, carried out in mice, focuses on salt. The researchers have successfully used sodium chloride nanoparticles to destroy cancer cells. Scientists — many from the University of Georgia, in Athens — are looking to sodium chloride, or salt, in nanoparticle form.
The authors of the new study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, tested their theory that “Sodium chloride nanoparticles (SCNPs) can be exploited as a Trojan horse strategy to deliver ions into cells and disrupt the ion homeostasis.”
“Unlike conventional chemotherapeutics, SCNPs cause immunogenic cell death or ICD. In vivo studies show that SCNPs not only kill cancer cells, but also boost an anticancer immunity. The discovery opens up a new perspective on nanoparticleâ€based therapeutics.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201904058
SCNPs contain millions of sodium and chlorine atoms, but the ion channels responsible for keeping salt out do not recognize them in this form.
Consequently, SCNPs are free to enter the cell, and once inside, they dissolve, releasing sodium and chlorine ions that become trapped in the cell.
These ions disrupt cellular machinery and rupture the plasma membrane. As the cell membrane breaks open, the sodium and chlorine atoms are released. This, in turn, signals an immune response and inflammation.
Using a mouse model, the scientists tested their theory. They injected SCNPs into tumors and charted their growth. They compared the growth of these tumors with those of mice in a control group who had received the same quantity of sodium chloride in a solution, rather than as nanoparticles.
The team found that the SCNPs suppressed tumor growth by 66%, compared with the control group. Importantly, there were no signs that the SCNPs caused damage to any of the mice's organs.
This method appears to be safe. As associate professor and lead author Jin Xie, Ph.D., explains: “After the treatment, the nanoparticles are reduced to salts, which are merged with the body's fluid system and cause no systematic or accumulative toxicity. No sign of systematic toxicity was observed with SCNPs injected at high doses.” Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327468
Findings suggest common salt activates anti-tumor cells
Source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-common-salt-anti-tumor-cells.html
Salt could help to boost the immune defense against cancer. This is suggested by the research findings of a team led by Prof. Dr. Christina Zielinski, who holds the Chair of Infection Immunology at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. The group presents its findings in Nature Immunology.
Sodium chloride, commonly known as "table salt, " was a valuable commodity in history. Today, table salt is cheap and indispensable in the kitchen. It is therefore not surprising that it has long since found its way into our everyday language—although not all expressions always bode well. However, the phrase "rubbing salt into the wound" could soon be given a positive twist, namely in cancer therapy.
In the past, cancer was usually a death sentence, but research has made considerable progress in recent decades and has significantly increased the survival time with a high quality of life for many types of cancer. Recently, adoptive T-cell therapy in particular has developed into an effective treatment tool.
Here, certain of the body's own white blood cells, the T cells, are modified in such a way that they can specifically recognize and fight tumor cells. The effectiveness of this method is influenced by the metabolic activity of the T cells, which is usually suppressed in the immunosuppressive environment of a tumor. It is therefore important to identify factors that overcome this suppression.
The team led by Christina Zielinski from the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology—Hans Knöll Institute (Leibniz-HKI) in Jena has now discovered one of these factors: Sodium ions—a component of sodium chloride—increase the efficiency of antitumoral T cells. The researchers were able to show that breast cancer tumors have a higher sodium concentration than healthy tissue and that T cells act particularly strongly against tumors when the immediate environment has a higher sodium concentration. These patients then even have a longer survival time.
"We were able to show that sodium enhances the immune response of CD8+ T cells, " says Chang-Feng Chu, who is a first author of the study. CD8+ T cells are immune cells that can recognize and kill tumor cells or cells infected with viruses in the body.
"Previous research has already shown that sodium regulates other types of T cells involved in autoimmune diseases and allergies. We wanted to find out what effect sodium has specifically on the activity of human CD8+ T cells, " explains Shan Sun, another first author.
The researchers therefore used various technologies to investigate the effect of sodium ions on gene regulation and the metabolic process of CD8+ T cells. "We pre-treated the human T cells with salt and then cultured them with tumors. We also carried out mouse experiments with T cells, " Chu explains.
Immune cells become fitter
The researchers found that the salt improved the metabolic fitness of the CD8+ T cells by increasing the uptake of sugar and amino acids and thus energy production in the cells. As a result, the immune cells were better able to eliminate tumor cells, as the experiments on cell cultures and mice have shown. "Pancreatic tumors shrank in the mice after we injected them with T cells pre-treated with salt, " says Chu.
But how exactly does sodium work in the cell? "Sodium ions increase the activity of the sodium-potassium pump on the cell membrane of T cells. This leads to a change in the membrane potential, which in turn increases the activation of the T-cell receptor, " reports Sun. "This signal amplification makes it easier for the immune cells to kill tumor cells more efficiently."
Her colleague Chu adds, "The salt also protects the T cells from becoming exhausted too quickly. This is important because exhausted T cells gradually lose their ability to fight cancer cells."
The research team recommends using sodium chloride as a positive regulator for the "killer" function of T cells in future. Of course, this is not about patients consuming more salt in their diet. Rather, it is conceivable that the immune cells are exposed to an increased salt concentration outside the body and become highly active against tumor cells after being administered to the patients.
Ordinary table salt could therefore support adoptively transferred T cells in the fight against cancer and possibly also against infectious diseases that require a defense against infected cells. So, the expression "rubbing salt into someone's wound" does not necessarily remain a negative one
