Medicinal Ice Cream Can Help Ease Pain of Cancer Patients

Ice cream may not seem like the most likely candidate for a medical application, but it only stands to reason: if a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, wouldn’t a bowl of ice cream do the trick even better?

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on November 01 2009

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As many parents know, ice cream can ease the pain of any child’s boo-boo or scrape within seconds. But when it comes to something far more serious—like cancer—there’s often little we can do to ease a patient’s pain. Treating the cancer through chemotherapy has its own set of evils: in many cases, chemotherapy can cause diarrhea, anemia, severe weight loss, and a variety of other side effects. In some situations, the side effects are so dangerous that they put the patient’s life at risk.

But now, scientists at University of Auckland in New Zealand are hoping a high-tech new kind of ice cream could help cancer patients get through grueling chemotherapy treatment with a minimum of problems. The strawberry-flavored superfood, which includes specially-selected milk fats and dairy proteins known for their healing properties, was developed in a partnership between medical and dairy researchers, known as LactoPharma.

The ice cream is known as ReCharge, and is currently in trial stages in New Zealand. 10 cancer patients are experimenting with the ice cream now, with another 190 expected to join the trial.

Ice cream may not seem like the most likely candidate for a medical application, but it only stands to reason: if a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, wouldn’t a bowl of ice cream do the trick even better?

Filed under: General Interest, Health and Wellbeing,

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