Mushroom of immortality
Medical myths about mushrooms: reishi
Alexandra "Renoire" Alekseeva, Sergey Bolshakov, XX2 century
"Mushroom of immortality" – this is how reishi was christened, the tinder box, which will be discussed in this article. Due to the colossal PR in the media as a panacea for all diseases, it is in demand among fans of alternative medicine. Why he does not heal, but only empties the pockets of a gullible buyer, we will tell you further.
Reishi and BAD from it.
Fungotherapy, also known as mushroom therapy, is, oddly enough, a new phenomenon that has appeared in the wake of the spread of alternative medicine. Then it was massively considered separately from treatment with other folk methods (before that, diseases were treated with what they could, among other things, with mushrooms, but not only with them). The "canons" of mushroom treatment on the Internet are growing like mushrooms after rain. Information about medicinal mushrooms is distributed according to folklore principles, only not by word of mouth, but from post to post. Fortunately, most of the mushrooms that people eat as a remedy are harmless (and useless, of course), and therefore there are no negative consequences from their use. But it often seems to people that they observe the effect of their use, since the body sometimes tends to cope with the disease without intervention, and a person, in turn, does not like things that he cannot control, so it is more convenient for him to think that it was mushrooms that helped him.
This is how reishi grows on commercial farms.
Since "a lover of being treated with natural products is not a mammoth, and will not die out," the Internet is full of charlatans who want to cash in on gullible citizens. In the last article about mushrooms, we mentioned domestic mushroom therapists – Mikhail Vishnevsky and Irina Filippova. Mushroom treatment is also quite popular abroad. It is promoted by such influencers as Andrew Weil, a holistic therapist (has the status of M.D.), food blogger Eugenia Bone and mycologist Paul Stamets. Each of these "healers" has a personal financial interest in promoting mushrooms. The first treats everything with mushrooms, from gout to prostatitis, and the last two sell their books with treatment methods. All of them, as one, praise the beneficial properties of cordyceps, shiitake and the hero of our material, the reishi mushroom. These three species have a painstakingly built up medical reputation over the years. Although from the point of view of evidence-based medicine, their use does not have any serious effect on the body. By the way, often "healers" openly declare that there are fake mushrooms, allegedly grown in the wrong conditions in which it is necessary. This is a good marketing move to promote your "right" products and move a competitor.
Due to the fact that the use of mushroom supplements is almost always harmless, the attention of regulatory authorities to them is rather non–transparent. Advertising of such products is poorly regulated. But there are successes along this path: as of 2018, 109 WHO member countries have introduced legislative regulation of traditional medicine, including mushroom medicine. However, this regulation does not prohibit the sale of mushroom supplements, which allows numerous companies to lie about the miraculous properties of "natural mushrooms".
Don't rush to put Reishi in your mouth
Ganoderma lucidum is a macromycete from the class of agarics. In the Russian–speaking environment, it has many names - reishi mushroom, immortality mushroom, lacquered tinder, ganoderma. The Chinese name of this mushroom is lingzhi. The culture of their treatment came to us from Southeast Asia, which has been under the cultural influence of China for many centuries. In the sources we find this mushroom, starting with the Han Dynasty, which ruled the Middle Kingdom two thousand years ago. Although the history of mushroom medicine in this region, as you can see, has been going on for a couple of millennia, people began to live longer there only after getting acquainted with evidence-based modern medicine. However, contrary to common sense, more and more Europeans and Americans are choosing traditional Southeast Asian medicine to fight various ailments.
Reishi mushroom is attributed immunomodulatory, antitumor, hepatoprotective and antiviral properties. It is claimed that it is able to replace antibiotics, reduces the level of fats and glucose in the blood, has anti-inflammatory, anti-allergenic and antioxidant effects, regulates the cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous systems. Characteristically, similar characteristics of "unicalization" are assigned to almost any means of traditional medicine. Usually such statements do not contain references to sources, and if they do, then these sources are of questionable quality.
Numerous scientific publications devoted to the study of the properties of secondary metabolites of reishi, as a rule, report a variety of useful properties that people may someday learn to use in the treatment of various types of cancer, viral, bacterial and chronic diseases (primary metabolites are similar in all living organisms – nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and secondary metabolites are unique for each group, perform some specialized functions that are not directly related to growth and reproduction). Claims that we can observe and use these beneficial effects right now, in fact, are confirmed by studies with poor-quality methodology. There are only a small number of studies on the fungus with a high evidence level. For example, in the Cochrane review of articles on the use of reishi in cardiovascular diseases, 4897 scientific papers were reviewed. Of all this multitude, only 10 have passed the quality test of the methodology. What does the message about low or insufficient quality of research mean in general? That it was carried out on animals or on animal and human cell cultures, and not on people themselves, that small samples were used, there was no "blindness" or there were "games" with statistical analysis (you can read about the problem of fitting the results to the threshold value after which the differences are considered proven in Peter Talantov's book "0.05. Evidence-based medicine from magic to the search for immortality"). If you successfully select reviewers, then it is not so difficult to publish a bad work. At the same time, any of these low-quality or insufficient studies will be suitable for a customized propaganda article on the Internet: no one will understand the methodology. And the study itself, in fact, can be ordered by the manufacturer of mushroom supplements, that is, there may be a conflict of interest. But usually people pay attention, at best, to the presence of a link to an article in a peer-reviewed journal, without reading the article itself further than the title.
If we approach it from the standpoint of evidence-based medicine, the use of reishi in the treatment of various types of cancer is not based on sufficient evidence. The same applies to the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. There is also additional information about the possible harm of the fungus. For drugs from reishi, nausea, insomnia, toxic effects on lymphocytes, liver damage, chronic diarrhea appear as side effects.
Most of all research on the medicinal properties of reishi is working with extracts (water or alcohol) from the fruit body or mycelium. A mixture of different substances – beta-glucans, polysaccharides, triterpenes and others - is drawn out of the mushroom in this way. Moreover, the extract from fruit bodies contains not a single substance in high concentration, but a mixture of various compounds, and only those that could be extracted under specific conditions from mushrooms that also grew in some medium and differ in composition from those grown in another. The exact composition of the extract and the concentration of substances in it usually remain unknown. Cells in culture may behave in a certain way as a result of exposure to such an extract (for example, die), but this may not be a reaction directly to the extract, but, for example, to methanol – the basis of the extract. Another factor that prevents honest researchers from making loud statements about the fungus is that research on cell cultures and on animals is a very early stage, extremely far from large–scale clinical studies on living people. It is by no means possible to transfer the conclusions made as a result of such studies to the human body.
Moreover, the results of individual experiments cannot be applied to all mushroom-based dietary supplements: they simply may not contain substances with the declared activity. And if such a substance turns out to be in dietary supplements, then the consumer is likely to have problems with the right dosage and digestibility in this particular form. In addition, one should not forget about the contamination of preparations from mushrooms (especially dried fruit bodies) with toxins, microscopic fungi and bacteria.
In addition, recent studies in taxonomy have shown that tinder beetles with a lacquered cap and a more or less pronounced leg, which were previously united under the name Ganoderma lucidum, represent not one species, but a complex of closely related species with different geographical distribution. In Europe, there are three different very similar biological species of the genus Ganoderma on a leg and with lacquered hats: Ganoderma lucidum, G. carnosum and G. valesiacum. Ganoderma lingzhi, lucidum s. str., shanxiense, boninense are common in the Far East of Russia and in the forests of the middle belt, in Japan, Korea, and in the temperate zone of China. It is Ganoderma lingzhi that is mentioned in Chinese medical treatises. In tropical Asia (southern China, Vietnam, India, Philippines, etc.) there are Ganoderma calidophilum, flexipes, leucocontextum, multipileum, sichuanense, sinense, tropicum, weixiensis, etc. There are also many types of reishi in America. And the content of different "active substances" in these types is different. In fact, it remains unclear for which species the hypothetical possibility of effective treatment is characteristic, since, despite the "nationality" of G. linzhi, different types of ganoderma appear in different studies that have studied the potential for therapeutic use.
What grows in Russia, especially in the European part, and what is considered therapeutic in China are different types, and in China itself there are many varnished ganoderms on a leg that are similar to each other. Only a mycologist can distinguish them, and it is better if he is armed with equipment for DNA isolation and sequencing. But whether a resident of Moscow will be able to recognize which ganoderma was sold to him is questionable. By the way, most likely they sold him the usual common in Russia Ganoderma lucidum. And in In America, one of the tests of commercial strains and reishi products showed that the vast majority of them belong to G. linzhi, the kind that was treated in China. But some belong to other types, including those that are not usually considered curative, and their treatment is not supported even by any folk tradition.
As a rule, foreign companies specializing in the sale of medicinal mushrooms write in their product catalogs that they disclaim responsibility for any undesirable effect of the mushroom, and also indicate that statements about positive medicinal properties have not been confirmed by an authoritative body – in the case of the United States, this is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This is exactly the picture we see on the Fungi Perfecti website, founded by Paul Stamets.
In Russia, as a rule, no one is in a hurry to warn the buyer. All we have for the initial assessment, "is it a medicine", is the State Register of Medicines (and a useful addition to it, the Firing List of drugs – VM). If the drug is not listed there, most likely it is a dietary supplement, the harmlessness of which can be checked in the register of Rospotrebnadzor. By the way, some believe that if the drug is mentioned in the aggregator of medical research PubMed, then its use is justified. But PubMed is just a library of scientific papers like the Russian elibrary. There are a lot of journals of different quality, from very serious ones, to be published in which means, among other things, to register a public clinical trial plan before the start of the experiments, to frankly "garbage" ones, in which you can publish anything for money. Those who like to cite articles from PubMed as proof rarely pay attention to the rating of the magazine, to the content of the article, reading the maximum of the annotation.
In conclusion, let's say that the most harmless way of mushroom treatment is meditative mushroom picking in the autumn forest. Breathing fresh air and taking a break from the routine has not hurt anyone yet. But it's not worth dragging various substances with unproven usefulness and, moreover, safety into your mouth.
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