Reishi Mushrooms: Which Benefits Do They Really Have?

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Reishi Mushrooms

Another Monday Research Review, another mushroom! If we keep this up, we’ll have to rename it “Mushroom Monday”.

But, there’s so much room for things to say, and these are fun guys to write about, as we check the science for any spore’ious claims…

Why do people take reishi?

Popular health claims for the reishi mushroom include:

  • Immune health
  • Cardiovascular health
  • Protection against cancer
  • Antioxidant qualities
  • Reduced fatigue and anxiety

And does the science agree?

Let’s take a look, claim by claim:

Immune health

A lot of research for this has been in vitro (ie, with cell cultures in labs), but promising, for example:

Immunomodulating Effect of Ganoderma lucidum (Lingzhi) and Possible Mechanism

(that is the botanical name for reishi, and the Chinese name for it, by the way)

That’s not to say there are no human studies though; here it was found to boost T-cell production in stressed athletes:

Effect of Ganoderma lucidum capsules on T lymphocyte subsets in football players on “living high-training low”

Cardiovascular health

Here we found a stack of evidence for statistically insignificant improvements in assorted measures of cardiovascular health, and some studies where reishi did not outperform placebo.

Because the studies were really not that compelling, instead of taking up room (and your time) with them, we’re going to move onto more compelling, exciting science, such as…

Protection against cancer

There’s a lot of high quality research for this, and a lot of good results. The body of evidence here is so large that even back as far as 2005, the question was no longer “does it work” or even “how does it work”, but rather “we need more clinical studies to find the best doses”. Researchers even added:

❝At present, lingzhi is a health food supplement to support cancer patients, yet the evidence supporting the potential of direct in vivo anticancer effects should not be underestimated.❞

~ Yuen et al.

Check it out:

Anticancer effects of Ganoderma lucidum: a review of scientific evidence

Just so you know we’re not kidding about the weight of evidence, let’s drop a few extra sources:

By the way, we shortened most of those titles for brevity, but almost all of the continued with “by” followed by a one-liner of how it does it.

So it’s not a “mysterious action” thing, it’s a “this is a very potent medicine and we know how it works” thing.

Antioxidant qualities

Here we literally only found studies to say no change was found, one that found a slight increase of antioxidant levels in urine. It’s worth noting that levels of a given thing (or its metabolites, in the case of some things) in urine are often quite unhelpful regards knowing what’s going on in the body, because we get to measure only what the body lost, not what it gained/kept.

So again, let’s press on:

Reduced fatigue and anxiety

Most of the studies for this that we could find pertained to health-related quality of life for cancer patients specifically, so (while they universally give glowing reports of reishi’s benefits to health and happiness of cancer patients), that’s a confounding factor when it comes to isolating its effects on reduction of fatigue and anxiety in people without cancer.

Here’s one that looked at it in the case of reduction of fatigue, anxiety, and other factors, in patients without cancer (but with neurathenia), in which they found it was “significantly superior to placebo with respect to the clinical improvement of symptoms”.

Summary:

  • Reishi mushroom’s anti-cancer properties are very, very clear
  • There is also good science to back immune health claims
  • It also has been found to significantly reduce fatigue and anxiety in unwell patients (we’d love to see more studies on its benefits in otherwise healthy people, though)

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    Engin Akyurt/Pexels

    Generic terms for the class of conditions

    Generic terms – such as mental illness, psychiatric disorder or psychological problem – have largely escaped attention in debates about the language of mental ill health. These terms refer to mental health conditions as a class.

    Many terms are currently in circulation, each an adjective followed by a noun. Popular adjectives include mental, mental health, psychiatric and psychological, and common nouns include condition, disease, disorder, disturbance, illness, and problem. Readers can encounter every combination.

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    Therapist talks to young man
    Is ‘mental health problem’ actually less pathologising? Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

    Arguably, this development points to what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls the “euphemism treadmill”, the tendency for language to evolve new terms to escape (at least temporarily) the offensive connotations of those they replace.

    English linguist Hazel Price argues that mental health has increasingly come to replace mental illness to avoid the stigma associated with that term.

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    The figure presents the relative popularity of the top ten terms in the larger data set (Google Books). The 14 least popular terms are combined into the remainder.

    Relative popularity of alternative generic terms in the Google Books corpus. Haslam et al., 2024, PLOS Mental Health.

    Several trends appear. Mental has consistently been the most popular adjective component of the generic terms. Mental health has become more popular in recent years but is still rarely used.

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    Since 1940, mental illness has clearly become the preferred generic term. Although an assortment of alternatives have emerged, it has steadily risen in popularity.

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    Our study documents striking shifts in the popularity of generic terms, but do these changes matter? The answer may be: not much.

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    Dark field
    The labels we use may not have a big impact on levels of stigma. Pixabay/Pexels

    Is ‘distress’ any better?

    Recently, some writers have promoted distress as an alternative to traditional generic terms. It lacks medical connotations and emphasises the person’s subjective experience rather than whether they fit an official diagnosis.

    Distress appears 65 times in the 2022 Victorian Mental Health and Wellbeing Act, usually in the expression “mental illness or psychological distress”. By implication, distress is a broad concept akin to but not synonymous with mental ill health.

    But is distress destigmatising, as it was intended to be? Apparently not. According to one study, it was more stigmatising than its alternatives. The term may turn us away from other people’s suffering by amplifying it.

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    Mental illness is easily the most popular generic term and its popularity has been rising. Research indicates different terms have little or no effect on stigma and some terms intended to destigmatise may backfire.

    We suggest that mental illness should be embraced and the proliferation of alternative terms such as mental health problem, which breed confusion, should end.

    Critics might argue mental illness imposes a medical frame. Philosopher Zsuzsanna Chappell disagrees. Illness, she argues, refers to subjective first-person experience, not to an objective, third-person pathology, like disease.

    Properly understood, the concept of illness centres the individual and their connections. “When I identify my suffering as illness-like,” Chappell writes, “I wish to lay claim to a caring interpersonal relationship.”

    As generic terms go, mental illness is a healthy option.

    Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne and Naomi Baes, Researcher – Social Psychology/ Natural Language Processing, The University of Melbourne

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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