Home remedies · Everyday life & travel
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
One or two tablespoons of pumpkin seeds a day, hulled or unhulled, over weeks — chewed, over salad or as a paste. Usual amounts in trials run from 5 to 10 grams of seeds, or standardised extracts. Alongside: drink less in the evening, but no less during the day.
Pumpkin seeds carry phytosterols — delta-7 sterols, a make-up hardly found elsewhere — plus zinc, selenium and lignans. The assumed route runs through the hormone metabolism in the glandular tissue and through the tension of the smooth muscle at the bladder neck. Human trials exist; they are mostly small, run over twelve months and find improvement in the complaints, not in the size of the gland. So the effect is on the passing of water, not on the tissue — modest in size, but measurable.
It works slowly. There is nothing to judge before eight to twelve weeks, and anyone who stops after a fortnight has not tried it. Pumpkin seeds are calorie-rich — two tablespoons come to about 100 kilocalories. Above all: trouble passing water is no reason to skip the work-up. Other things make exactly the same signs, and a seed does not tell them apart.
With blood in the urine, with pain on passing water, with fever alongside pain in the perineum or back, if nothing comes at all although the bladder presses — that is an emergency —, with weight loss, with bone pain, and always once at the start: what lies behind the complaints should be looked at before anyone eats something against it.
Have it assessed: heat with confusion, dry hot skin or clouded consciousness — that is more than exhaustion. A one-sided swollen leg after a long journey. And anything new that does not go away within a few days.