Thanks for that info. That's pretty interesting about its anti-inflammatory qualities. Im wondering now about its medical uses.
I actually happen to have an issue that it might help if its as good as you make it out to be. About a year ago i was treated for a prostate infection that i battled for around a year and a half. The infection sucked. The antibiotics to treat it sucked. And even now, a year later, i have good days and bad days. The infection itself is gone but due to the nature of the prostate, being a sensitive gland, it now ( for the rest of my life sadly) is easily inflamed. So, depending what i eat, if im around chemicals or anything that can get in my body and have an inflammatory effect, ill have days where i feel the need to pee 10000 times an hour. However, if i have a headache sometimes and take an Advil for it the whole day ill feel great like before i ever had prostate issues, and i know it's because that Advil reduces inflammation there. So anyhow, im interested in the effects there for sure!
Boring answer: according to Lebot's book, Kava: The Pacific Drug, what you describe is precisely one of the things kava is used for medicinally.
Personal answer: it solved all of my prostate and urinary tract issues, BUT, and this is a big caveat, it took months of daily use AND I had to drink lots of water all the time as part of the process, and pee a lot, as kava is a notorious diuretic, it dries you up in many more ways than one so whatever you do, if drinking kava drink water, more than you think you need or expect to. Maybe more than that. And just a little more for good measure. You'll thank me later.
The other caveat is this might not work for everybody. I am fortunate in that my body is very receptive to kava, it fixed ALL my problems, except for being a schmuck on the internet, but I kind of like that.
Many weeks ago there was something that passed out of me, it looked horrible, like something out of HP Lovecraft, and I've been fine ever since.
A year ago I had an episode of gross hematuria that was unbelievable, just passing copious amounts of almost pure thick blood for a day and a half. They told me it was symptomatic of advanced renal cancer, stage 4, which it normally is, apparently, and I'd be probably dead within a month. The odds of that were so high they said there was no point in doing an MRI, just go home, get your affairs in order and Netflix and chill, if you can order on a monthly plan, no long term commitments.
I was cool with that but skeptical and have insurance so I said what the hell. MRI showed, nothing, nothing at all. Problem went away, but I still had some minor problems, obviously something was wrong, and not just being an old man.
Six months later kava found me and after some months of daily use, which I was pursuing as a guinea pig for my wife, who needed help with insomnia and mild anxiety due to a stressful job, to make sure it was safe and not a placebo, and stuck with because I loved the effect on dreams, all my inflammatory problems cleared up (I've had an inflammatory disorder all my life called Unspecified Spondyloarthropathy, which shows up in a variety of bizarre ways. In my youth it was stomach pain and lower back pain. When I got older I would get repeated bouts of iritis, episodes of enthesitis in my heels, lower back, tailbone, various skin problems, obesity. All of these were dealt with, I firmly believe, by kava. My body had been in a constant state of inflammation, plus I had specific episodes or attacks of acute inflammation, over the course of 50 years. I doubt anyone will believe it, but I believe my addiction to cigarettes (which I beat 28 years ago) and gambling (beat 10 years ago) and drinking beer regularly for 45 years (beat 2 or 3 months ago, I refuse to keep track any closer than that, so irrelevant is it to my life now) all came from a kind of inflammation of the brain. I feel now not just not addicted to anything, but in a state of non-addiction, like I could not be addicted to anything, like kava is a form of anti-addiction (I wish I could express this in a way which made better sense, but just like I never suffered anxiety, so kava doesn't kill for me an anxiety I never had, rather, it gives me something that is the opposite of anxiety. Similarly, it gives me something that is the opposite of addiction, rather than just makes me not addicted. Darn, like I said, hard to articulate this so it doesn't sound silly).
ftr I wrote all of this while krunk on Squanch and it all made sense to me at the time. But that's just the first wash.
I would recommend that if your interest in kava is strictly medicinal, and it is focused on urinary tract or prostate problems, Fijian kavas are what you want to focus on. Only Fijian kavas show evidence of preventing prostate cancer and of shrinking both benign and malignant existing tumors or of shrinking BPH. And then, of course, there are no guarantees: it depends on how well your body responds to it.
For me, it has drastically reduced my weight, which will have a secondary effect, reducing problems from the excessive weight I had. So in some ares, perhaps it isn't the kava affecting the urinary or prostate issues directly, by systemically dropping my weight, it makes my pipes better as a secondary effect.
I think that much of the way inflammation works, and what makes it so insidious, is it snowballs. e.g. Inflammation causes overweight which then cause more inflammation which causes overeating (and overdrinking beer) which in turn causes more inflammation which causes more overweight and so on and son on and next thing you know you're on a conveyor belt going one way and can't get off, despite your best ad most sincere efforts.
What I've been through has taught me less sympathy for myself than sympathy for others. In most, most all, all? cases those problems they have are not their fault. They got hit with something you can't fight on your own just by willpower. I suspect that is also true of depression and anxiety, which I suspect are inflammations of the brain, just as obesity is an inflammation of the gut and related hormones.
