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The cow is regarded as a sacred animal in Hinduism, and as expected, there are a lot of people in India (including very prominent religious leaders and politicians) who want to show that even its urine (and dung) has the potential for treating all kinds of diseases, including cancer.

Here is one (among many) articles published in NCBI that claims that there is a serious case to be made for cow urine as being medically beneficial for a lot of things, including the treatment of cancer.

My questions are:

  1. Are articles that are submitted to NCBI peer-reviewed, or just about anyone can submit them? Is there a quality check?
  2. Has there been a refutation of the claims in that article by an expert?
  3. If not, are the claims really valid, specifically the anti-cancer properties of cow urine?

The language used in the article strongly indicates that the article is motivated by something other than objective curiosity, but it'd be good to have solid arguments against the article's claims.

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  • I would recommend to focus the question about the specific claim, e.g. "does cow urine have anticancer properties", and not about this specific article itself. The article is a review, so it's not an actual study but an overview. And whether the journal is peer-reviewed doesn't tell you much about the validity of the claim.
    – Mad Scientist - on strike ♦
    May 1, 2019 at 13:12
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    The article isn't published in NCBI, the NCBI is a US government agency that also runs the Pubmed database of scientific articles and Pubmed Central, which is what you linked to. The actual article is published in the "Journal of Intercultural Ethnopharmacology", which is now renamed to "Journal of Complementary Medicine Research"
    – Mad Scientist - on strike ♦
    May 1, 2019 at 13:41
  • Inline with @MadScientist's advice, the underlying claim here is that cow urine has health benefits - the discussion of peer-review and the definition of "valid" are side-issues. This is a duplicate.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    May 1, 2019 at 14:13
  • The "hardness" of quality is hinted at in the old name of the journal. A further hint is found here, renamed to jocmr. They claim to be peer revied, but that really says nothing and could be a lie or 'cargo cult science'… Finally, the alerting sentence from the page linked by OP is in the last paragraph: "More well-planned studies in human subjects are required" -> Interesting results from a couple of lab studies without any proof in praxi
    – LangLаngС
    May 1, 2019 at 15:30
  • @LangLangC From the journal's Instructions for Authors page: "BUT, if the reviewer(s) and/or editor(s) suggest that article requires editing (grammatical, language, image improve etc), author may be charged for this article improving process." This would raise red flags. Regardless, could I ask what you mean by "cargo cult science" and how the term applies here?
    – Barry Harrison
    May 2, 2019 at 13:39

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