Potential medicinal uses for wild yam include the treatment of menopause symptoms, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and muscular cramps.
Wild yam is a plant that people have used for centuries in alternative medicine. There are various other names for wild yam, such as colic root, devil’s bones, rheumatism root, or China root. While there are over 600 species of wild yam, only 12 are edible.
The bulb and roots of wild yams contain a chemical called diosgenin, which can influence the production of several useful hormones in humans, such as estrogen or dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA).
Consuming wild yam may be a natural way of promoting these hormones in the body, which could have certain medical benefits.
However, at present, there is little evidence to support any medical applications of wild yam. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have yet to evaluate wild yam for its safety or effectiveness.
Some of the potential medical uses of wild yam include:
Some traditional medicine practitioners suggest using wild yam as an alternative to estrogen replacement therapy for treating symptoms of menopause. The theory is that wild yam may increase or stabilize estrogen levels in the body to help relieve a person’s symptoms.
However, there is very little evidence to support these claims. One of the only
Some traditional medicine practitioners believe that wild yam has anti-inflammatory properties and use it to treat rheumatoid arthritis.
There still needs to be more research specifically about Rheumatoid arthritis and wild yam, but its action as an anti-inflammatory could reduce pain by interacting with with the body’s ability to increase inflammation.
Wild yam also contains a chemical called dioscoretine which has been shown to regulate blood sugar levels.
Wild yam could be useful in regulating blood sugar levels in people with diabetes. However, the effect of dioscoretine on blood sugar has only been studied in animals so far. It is unclear whether it would have the same effect in humans.
Other proponents of wild yam believe that it has anti-spasmodic properties, which are substances that reduce muscle spasms.
This anti-spasmodic property means that wild yam might be useful for reducing cramps and muscular pain related to premenstrual syndrome