Commercial aloe juice is made from the inner leaf, which is blended and strained, with a preservative added.  To make aloe “gel”, the juice is thickened with seaweed to mimic the leaf’s original thick consistency.  The crystalline part called aloin, a brownish gel found alongside the leaf blade, is powdered and used in some commercial laxatives.  It is so strong that it must be combined with other herbs to prevent intestinal griping.  The commercial juice and gel remove this part of the leaf, so both the juice and the gel are soothing to digestive tract irritations, such as peptic ulcers and colitis.  In one study, the stomach lesions of twelve peptic ulcer patients were all completely healed.  A popular ingredient in commercial drug store products, aloe is commonly used to soothe burns, including sunburn and radiation burns.  Aloe is also applied to wounds, eczema, ringworm and poison oak and poison ivy rashes.  There is evidence that it effectively regenerated injured nerves.  One study reports aloe to be successful in healing leg ulcerations and severe acne and even finds that it promotes hair growth.  When 56 frostbit patients were treated with a product containing 70% aloe, only 7% developed infections, compared to 98 frostbitten patients not treated with aloe, 33 of whom eventually needed amputation.  It has also proved helpful in treating periodontosis.  One study injected aloe extracts into the diseased areas of 128 patients with varying degrees of gum disease.  Within a week, the development of symptoms stopped, pain decreased and marked improvement followed in all patients.

Aloe is wide used in folk medicine, both as a liniment and as a drink, to reduce the swelling and pain of arthritis and rheumatism.  Diabetics in the Arabian peninsula eat aloe to control their blood sugar levels.  A clinical study did find that when volunteers who were not insulin dependent took half a teaspoon daily for 4-14 weeks, their fasting blood sugar levels were reduced by half, with no change in body weight.

Another preparation from aloe, carrisyn, is a polysaccharide.  It has been claimed that carrisyn directly kills various types of viruses, including herpes and measles, and possibly HIV.  However, research is still in the preliminary stages.