Tea Time for Scorched Skin

Brits tend to think that a cup of tea can heal all ills, from a broken heart and a toxic hangover to a serious case of shock. I heartily agree. But tea also seems to have real medicinal benefits, from lowering cholesterol and speeding up your metabolism, to helping you lose weight and protecting you from cancer. And now, tea can add one more feather to its healing cap: that of a potent anti-inflammatory, capable of healing skin burned by radiotherapy.

Radiation is a highly effective cancer treatment, but it can be almost as unpleasant as the disease itself. Though doctors can accurately zero in on the malignant cells, avoiding the healthy cells around them, that fiery beam still has to pass through the skin to reach the cancer below. And where it passes, it burns. These burns can be distressing and disfiguring, and can make it dangerously tempting to call it quits on the program. Although estimates vary, one study found that 87% of patients suffer some sort of burn, so it’s a serious problem.

Official remedies are thin on the ground. Steroid creams don’t really work, and have nasty side effects themselves, so doctors can only really recommend keeping the area clean, using soothing moisturizers, taking painkillers if it gets really bad, and just letting the burn heal. Anyone who’s ever had severe sunburn knows that being told to just sit it out isn’t exactly a tempting option.

So some are turning to alternative methods. Tea compounds have been used for years to treat burns, but empirical evidence to support this practice was seriously lacking. Enter the team behind this current study, led by Dr Frank Pajonk of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

To study its healing potential, Pajonk and Co. created tea extract (i.e. made a cup of tea), and added it to human and mouse white blood cells in the lab. Sure enough, the tea extract inhibited the inflammatory process in the cultured cells. And, when they checked patient notes from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University Hospital in Freiburg, Germany, for 60 people who had used tea poultices on their burns, they found that inflammation lasted 5 to 10 days shorter for them than it did for those who didn’t use tea. The results were published in a recent volume of BMC Medicine.

So, how does tea do it? Probably through the high concentration of polyphenols, antioxidant compounds known to shut down part of the inflammatory response. They tried the experiment with both green and black tea, and found that the anti-inflammatory effect was stronger with the green tea. Green tea is not fermented in the same way as black tea is, so it has more of the good stuff.

Intriguingly, they saw more than one anti-inflammatory response in the tea-treated cells, suggesting that it is not enough to just use isolated polyphenol compounds; it has to be tea in total. That’s not to say it has to be a cup of tea exactly (although it goes without saying that will always make any situation better), just that tea is more than the sum of its parts. Break it up into its constituent chemicals and the magic is lost.

So in order to bring about a radiotherapy patient’s speedy recovery, don’t just provide them with a nice soothing cup of tea to go with their hospital meal, give them a green tea poultice to go with it. And then go and discover the healing powers of a cucumber sandwich or a digestive biscuit and we Brits will be truly happy.