In the last thirty years, medicinal mushrooms, traditionally used by Asian healers for thousands of years to strengthen the immune system, promote health and influence longevity, have gained the interest of scientific and medical researchers. In Japan, China, and most recently the US, researchers are discovering the practice of these ancient healers use of medicinal mushrooms is based on credible time-tested knowledge. The Cancer Research UK offers comprehensive monographs of medicinal mushrooms role in cancer prevention and cancer treatments.

Mushrooms, a good source of digestible proteins containing all essential amino acids, are considered by many to be a tasty and nutritional food. Early civilizations, by trial and error, built up a practical knowledge of mushrooms suitable to eat and those to be avoided. Wild mushrooms were regularly collected as a main source of food in soups, stews and teas. In the Orient, mushrooms were recognized as having valuable medicinal health benefits and used in extracts, concentrates, liquors, powders, tonics, tinctures, teas and soups.

Increasingly, in modern times, research findings regularly appear in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals demonstrating the potent and unique health enhancing properties of compounds extracted from a range of medicinal mushrooms. The Cancer Research UK monographs of medicinal mushrooms, available for download on a chapter by chapter basis as PDF documents, give an extensive analysis of the history and present state of knowledge of medicinal mushrooms and a detailed examination of medical implications with special emphasis on immuno-stimulation and cancer treatment.