Arthritis

Monika Kujawska et al. (2019) · Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine

This historical review examined Bryonia alba (white bryony), a vine in the cucumber family, tracing its use across northern and central-eastern Europe from antiquity through the twentieth century. The authors, an ethnobiologist and an ethnologist, worked from written and oral sources rather than a clinical study, covering Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and the Balkans. White bryony's root closely resembles the root of mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), a plant with an extensive European magical and medicinal reputation; the paper's central finding is that this resemblance let bryony function as mandrake's cheaper stand-in, inheriting much of its folklore in the process. Rather than enrolling participants, the authors searched historical floras, pharmacopoeias, ethnographic monographs, and travel accounts for every mention of the plant, then sorted findings into categories: ritual and folk-belief use, food, folk and historical medicine, ethnoveterinary practice, and ornamental planting. They cross-checked, where sources allowed, whether a given account referred to B. alba or its close relative B. dioica, and separated practices documented only in printed herbals ("booklore") from those recorded as living oral tradition passed between households. Across independent sources, root preparations were repeatedly recorded for oedema (fluid swelling, called dropsy at the time), convulsions and epilepsy, intestinal worms, wounds, and rheumatic pain — a 1792 Swedish account describes juice collected from a hollowed-out root curing oedema and treating worms, convulsions and headache, while twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts from Serbia and Kosovo describe the same root used as a purgative, diuretic and topical anti-rheumatic agent. The authors cite phytochemical literature attributing these effects to cucurbitacins (bitter plant compounds), also linked elsewhere to antitumor activity, while stating plainly that historical claims for epilepsy specifically lack sufficient supporting study. Toxicity is dose- and season-dependent: freshly harvested summer root contains the more toxic cucurbitacin I, and the berries carry a cited lethal dose of roughly 15 for a child and 40 for an adult. The authors report that medicinal use had become obsolete across Scandinavia, Germany and western Slavic regions by the twentieth century, surviving only in isolated Balkan communities in Serbia and Kosovo. The authors present this decline as an unusual case: a plant of substantial historical medicinal and magical importance that today survives mainly as an ornamental garden relic or, in North America, as an unrelated invasive weed. Because the review synthesizes historical and ethnographic records rather than testing the plant directly, it offers no controlled data on safety or effectiveness, and the authors themselves flag some recorded folklore as possibly the invention of root sellers rather than genuine tradition. Future work, the authors suggest, could extend this same source-based method to B. dioica across German-, Latin- and Celtic-speaking Europe.

Zhiyong Long et al. (2023) · Frontiers in immunology

Whether the plant compounds often discussed for rheumatoid arthritis — turmeric, green tea, pomegranate, garlic — actually do anything is the question this meta-analysis set out to answer. This review gathered every randomized trial it could find on the question: 47 trials, nearly 3,900 people, fifteen different plant polyphenols, from Iran, China, Korea, Egypt, Japan, Brazil, India and the United States. The clearest picture came from two of them. The first is total glucosides of paeony, an extract of Chinese peony root that is a licensed prescription medicine in China. Twenty-three trials tested it — always added to standard RA drugs like methotrexate, never instead of them. Disease activity scores came down, and so did CRP, ESR and rheumatoid factor, the blood markers doctors track. The most interesting result: people taking it reported *fewer* side effects than people on the standard drugs alone. That fits how it is used clinically — it appears to soften the toll the conventional drugs take on the liver and stomach. The second is curcumin, the yellow compound in turmeric. Five trials, and the same direction: lower disease activity, lower inflammatory markers, no extra side effects. Green tea polyphenols looked promising across two trials. Saffron did not show a clear effect. Everything else — pomegranate, garlic, resveratrol, sesame, cinnamon, ginger, kudzu, cranberry, olive oil, quercetin — rests on one or two small trials apiece, which is encouraging but not yet evidence that bears weight. The honest caveat, which the authors state plainly themselves: the trials disagreed with each other a great deal, most were small, and when the researchers sliced the data by dose and duration some of the headline benefits faded. Nearly all of these were add-on studies. Nobody tested a polyphenol against methotrexate, so the evidence says nothing about replacing a prescribed medication. What it does support is turmeric and peony extract as the best-evidenced candidates, studied as additions to existing treatment rather than replacements for it.

Liuting Zeng et al. (2022) · Frontiers in immunology

This systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 31 randomized controlled trials (34 study records, roughly 1,583 participants) exploring curcumin and Curcuma longa (turmeric) extract across 10 autoimmune diseases — conditions where the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own tissue. Autoimmune disease covers more than 120 named conditions; this review focused on ankylosing spondylitis, Behçet's disease, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, oral lichen planus, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Takayasu arteritis, and ulcerative colitis. Curcumin is the main active compound in turmeric, long used in Chinese medicine, and is studied here for its ability to regulate immune cells and reduce inflammation. Researchers searched English and Chinese databases plus the Cochrane Library and ClinicalTrials.gov through February 2022, screening 2,991 records down to 31 RCTs that tested curcumin or Curcuma longa extract against placebo or usual care. Trial count per disease varied widely: 9 RCTs for ulcerative colitis and 6 for oral lichen planus, but only 1 each for ankylosing spondylitis, Behçet's disease, and Takayasu arteritis. Doses ranged from 60 mg to 6,000 mg daily, taken orally, or in some trials applied as a gel, mouthwash, or enema, for 2 to 96 weeks. Disease activity was tracked with condition-specific scales (PASI for psoriasis, DAS28 for rheumatoid arthritis, EDSS for multiple sclerosis, and others) alongside blood markers like ESR and CRP. Where enough trials existed to combine statistically, curcumin performed well. In psoriasis, it roughly tripled the rate of major skin-clearance (PASI75: RR=3.01, p=0.008—meaning patients getting curcumin were about three times as likely to see substantial improvement). In ulcerative colitis, it raised clinical remission more than twofold (RR=2.28, p=0.0005) and lowered inflammatory markers ESR and CRP. In rheumatoid arthritis, it reduced the DAS28 disease-activity score (WMD=-1.10, p=0.0002—a clinically noticeable drop in joint disease activity), though results varied considerably between the five trials. Oral lichen planus, despite being studied in six trials, did not show a significant benefit on its pooled lesion-severity score (p=0.17). None of the pooled analyses found more side effects with curcumin than with placebo. The other six diseases each had just one or two small trials reporting improvement, too few to combine or confirm. These findings support curcumin as a reasonably safe adjunct for psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, and rheumatoid arthritis specifically, where the evidence is strongest and most consistent; for the seven other diseases, results are preliminary and should not yet guide treatment decisions. Curcumin's poor absorption from the gut remains a practical obstacle to reliable dosing. The authors call for larger, multi-center trials, especially for the thinly studied conditions, before broader clinical recommendations can be made.

YuJuan Zhang et al. (2020) · Current rheumatology reports

This review examined five years of research — 16 review articles and 11 randomized controlled trials published between 2016 and 2020 — to answer a question millions of people ask: does acupuncture actually work for chronic musculoskeletal pain? That umbrella covers osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and chronic low back pain, which together form the leading cause of disability worldwide. About three million American adults already use acupuncture yearly, most of them for these very conditions. The reviewers, writing in Current Rheumatology Reports, held studies to clear standards: randomized trials with at least 20 adults, pain as a measured primary outcome, and a genuine control group — sham needling, waiting list, active therapy, or routine care. They excluded dry needling and moxibustion so the conclusions would apply specifically to classical acupuncture at standard points. The answer turned out to be condition-specific, and refreshingly honest. Knee osteoarthritis and chronic low back pain earned the strongest support: short-term pain relief is real, and the authors call acupuncture a safe and reasonable referral option for both — a stance Medicare has since echoed by covering acupuncture for chronic low back pain. Fibromyalgia sits in the middle: acupuncture may help, but the evidence is thinner. Hip osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis land on the other side: the available evidence does not support acupuncture for either, a negative finding stated without hedging. Safety was favorable across the board. For joint or back pain, this review is essentially a map of where the evidence for acupuncture stands. It is a narrative synthesis rather than a statistical meta-analysis, so it pools no numbers of its own, and its authors close with the field''s standing caveat: the short-term benefits reported across these trials still need confirmation in larger, more rigorous studies, especially for the conditions in the middle ground.

He Chen et al. (2024) · Current pain and headache reports

Does acupuncture keep helping knee osteoarthritis after the needles stop? A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Current Pain and Headache Reports pooled 10 randomized controlled trials with 3,221 participants to answer exactly that, and found benefits lasting roughly 3 to 6 months after the final session. The durability depended on the comparison. Against sham acupuncture, real acupuncture kept function measurably better for 4.5 months after treatment ended, and overall pain stayed lower through 4.5 months as well. Against usual care, both pain relief and functional improvement remained large enough to matter clinically for 5 months. One trial comparing dry needling with the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac found relief persisting 6 months after treatment ended. Not every comparison favored acupuncture. When it was added on top of exercise-based physical therapy, it added nothing measurable for up to 11 months — exercise appears to occupy much of the same therapeutic ground. And two no-treatment-controlled trials disagreed, one showing 3 months of persistence and the other showing benefits only at end of treatment. Safety was consistently good across trials, with no significant excess of adverse events. For the estimated one in five adults over 40 living with knee osteoarthritis, the practical takeaway is that a 4-to-12-week course of acupuncture (typically 1–3 sessions weekly) can deliver relief that outlasts treatment by months — something NSAIDs and steroid injections generally cannot claim. It works best as its own treatment or alongside routine care, not stacked on structured exercise therapy, and results should be weighed knowing each individual comparison rested on relatively few trials.

Andrew J Vickers et al. (2017) · The journal of pain

This meta-analysis pooled the raw, patient-by-patient data of 20,827 people from 39 rigorously screened randomized trials — the largest and most careful analysis of acupuncture for chronic pain ever conducted. Acupuncture is the Traditional Chinese Medicine practice of inserting fine needles at specific body points; classical theory describes it as regulating qi (the body's vital functional energy) flowing through meridians (the mapped channels of that flow), while researchers here tested it purely on outcomes. Only trials with airtight randomization were included, covering four conditions: back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, chronic headache, and shoulder pain. The team obtained original data from trial authors and re-analyzed everything centrally — a gold-standard approach that removes many shortcuts ordinary meta-analyses must take. Acupuncture beat both comparison types for every condition (p < .001 — highly unlikely due to chance). Against no-acupuncture care the effect was about 0.5 standard deviations — in plain terms, starting from pain of 60/100, patients ended near 30 with acupuncture versus 43 without, and half of acupuncture patients achieved 50% pain reduction versus 30% of controls. Against sham (fake) acupuncture the margin was smaller (≈0.2 SD), meaning needle placement is only part of the benefit — but sham could not explain it all. Benefits lasted, fading only about 15% by one year. Neck and shoulder pain responded best (effect sizes 0.83 and 0.57 versus sham), and more sessions produced more relief (p = 0.001). Notably, the pooled effect matches or beats common anti-inflammatory drugs, whose effect sizes run below 0.23 for the same conditions. The authors' bottom line, unchanged since: referring a chronic pain patient for a course of acupuncture is a reasonable clinical option — with real, persistent, not-just-placebo benefit and an excellent safety profile.

Zeng L et al. (2022) · Frontiers in Immunology

This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluates the efficacy and safety of curcumin and Curcuma longa extract across five types of arthritis: rheumatoid arthritis (RA), osteoarthritis (OA), ankylosing spondylitis (AS), juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), and gout/hyperuricemia. Twenty-nine randomized controlled trials involving 2,396 participants were included, drawn from 11 countries. For RA (6 RCTs), curcumin significantly reduced disease activity (DAS28), ESR, CRP, and rheumatoid factor compared to controls. For OA (20 RCTs), curcumin reduced pain (VAS and WOMAC-pain), improved physical function, and decreased stiffness compared to placebo. Notably, curcumin showed comparable efficacy to NSAIDs (ibuprofen, diclofenac) with significantly fewer adverse events. For AS, a single RCT of nanocurcumin showed increased regulatory T cells and decreased IL-6. Two JIA trials found curcumin improved disease activity scores in children. Doses ranged from 120 to 1,500 mg daily for 4-36 weeks. The mechanisms of action include inhibition of NF-kB signaling, COX-2 suppression, NLRP3 inflammasome inhibition, and modulation of the RANK/RANKL/OPG system. Safety was favorable across all studies, with no serious adverse events attributed to curcumin. However, the evidence is limited by small sample sizes, short follow-up periods, high heterogeneity, and potential industry funding bias.

Pratyusha Veldhi et al. (2025) · Plants (Basel, Switzerland)

This 2023 ethnobotanical review investigated the medicinal plants native to Pike County, Eastern Kentucky, and their pharmacological benefits. The study combined a local survey with a literature review to validate the medicinal properties of 14 identified plants: Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), Pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata), Chicory (Cichorium intybus), Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), Ghost Pipe (Monotropa uniflora), Princess Tree (Paulownia tomentosa), American Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana), Purslane (Portulaca oleracea), Sassafras (Sassafras albidum), Porcelain (Hibiscus sabdariffa), Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra), Mullein (Verbascum thapsus), and Yellowroot (Xanthorhiza simplicissima). The survey identified various traditional uses for these plants, including nutritional benefits, insect repellent properties, and applications for conditions such as rheumatism, inflammation, and infections. For instance, Pawpaw is traditionally consumed for its nutritional value and has shown potential in modern research for anticancer and antimicrobial activities, with studies indicating its extracts inhibit the HIF-1 transcription factor, which is involved in tumor growth. Beautyberry has been noted for its insect-repelling properties and has demonstrated efficacy against MRSA infections in research settings. Pipsissewa has been traditionally used for rheumatism and has shown antifungal and anticancer properties in scientific studies. Chicory serves as a coffee substitute and has hepatoprotective and antidiabetic effects, while Boneset is recognized for its immune-boosting and anti-inflammatory properties. The findings highlight the rich ethnobotanical knowledge of the local population and the pharmacological potential of these plants. However, this review is limited by the small sample size of survey participants (n=4) and the reliance on self-reported data, which may introduce bias. Further research with larger, more diverse populations is needed to validate these findings and explore the therapeutic applications of these plants more comprehensively.

James R Kneller (2025) · Cureus

This case report followed one patient whose pacemaker surgery left a large pocket hematoma — a collection of blood at the implant site that usually resolves slowly and raises infection risk. The treating cardiologist added wearable "phototherapy" patches (LifeWave products such as X39), small adhesive discs claimed to reflect the body's own infrared light back into tissue, some placed over acupuncture points (specific body locations used in Traditional Chinese Medicine). Because this is a single case, there was no comparison group. Instead, the author asked experts how long such a hematoma would normally take to resolve and compared the patient's course against that survey: the hematoma cleared roughly six times faster than expected, a collapsed-lung complication also resolved quickly, and the patient reported side benefits like less arthritis pain and better sleep. The mechanism claims come mostly from manufacturer-linked sources — that the patches raise a regenerative peptide (GHK), boost carnosine (a molecule supporting cellular energy), or raise glutathione (a major antioxidant) by 300%. None of that was independently verified here, and the report itself says the products have not been evaluated by the US FDA and are not intended to treat medical conditions. The honest reading: an interesting anecdote, correctly labeled hypothesis-generating by its own author. One patient, no controls, a survey as the comparator, and commercial products with unverified mechanisms — this sits at the lowest tier of evidence and supports no treatment decision. It earns a place in the library only as documentation of an emerging device claim that future controlled studies would need to test.