The title should say most of the question because it a general one. Most cultures around the world have specific remedies often derived from plants that are used to treat or cure a wide range of conditions. Not all of them have stood up to scientific scrutiny but some have and modern science is still investigating many types of plants used by indigenous people to see if they really are a worthwhile treatment even today.
How did anyone figure out what treatment works for what condition in the first place? Drug companies spend billions of dollars on clinical trials for new drugs and the results are often controversial even in the best cases. Most people get better from most illnesses on their own anyway. Aspirin for example can be made from willow bark. It is a wonder that anyone ever thought to take willow bark extract in the old days for pain in the first place. I have no idea how they got to that point. After they did, how did they know that it worked? I have taken aspirin for pains before and the results are mixed at best. How did they determine what really works and what doesn’t without real studies and modern statistics?
Trial and error. Occasional empirical observation; if say a plant causes numbness trying to concentrate it for better effect is an obvious thing to do. And people just getting well on their own and mistaking their own body’s self repair for the “medicine” working; most traditional remedies don’t work remember.
While I don’t think there is ultimately a practical answer to the question, I think it is a combination of ‘trial and error’ and having a designated person in the group who is focused on the problem, be they a ‘shaman’ or a ‘medicine man’ who communicates with others and records what works and what doesn’t through empirical observation and experimentation
If one type of plant was known to work on anything at all (such as pain), it was likely used to treat everything wrong with a person, and when it didn’t work, well, then you probably tried plants that looked similar to it that might be of a derivative species.
Of course, that’s a good way to discover a lot of poisons too, but some poisons do have a therapeutic effect in small or directed uses (e.g. botox, or even chemotherapy drugs)
When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry years ago, ‘natural products’ were a big deal as a starting point for new drugs. ‘Older species’ tended to have more genetic diversity and were of primary interest, particularly if they came from diverse or harsh environments. Molds and neutabranches were of particular interest to us back then, as well as certain types of plants.
It’s not like the scientific method is entirely new. The basic idea of “try various things and see what works” is probably older than humanity. What’s new is keeping actual records of what did and didn’t work, and tracking them statistically.
If by “scientific method” the OP means techniques like the double blind experiment method, then I believe that is relatively new in human history. But it’s certainly possible to find legitimate solutions that work without them (a fact some posters here are strangely loath to admit).
A lot of animals seem to instinctively find those plants they need to cure various ailments out of tens of thousands available to them. Most have probably observed that a dog with indigestion will seek out certain grasses or plants, to the exclusion of all others, in a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to cure themselves. Red colobus monkeys figured out that eating charcoal was a cure for the chronic indigestion they suffered from high amounts of cyanide in their diet. In Tanzania both humans and chimpanzees alike eat the leaves from a certain tree to rid themselves of intestinal parasites. It is amazing even accounting for trial and error and dumb luck discoveries, considering the sheer number of plant species out there and the relatively short time we have existed. Instinct seems to play some role in the discovery of medicinal plants for other animals so maybe our early ancestors just had some ability we now lack to sniff out the cure for what ailed them.
Generally, they *didn’t. *Almost no remedies from the past actually work worth crap. For example, yes, willow bark does cure a headache, but it tears your stomach up like taking a whole handful of aspirin would do.
And of course, the death from disease rate was often very high during plagues, etc- life was nasty, brutish and short.
You don’t say – for another example, I’ve heard about an old wives tale that if you had a wound or sore you ought to put a piece of moldy bread on it as a “poultice”. :rolleyes: Sheesh, what a bunch of maroons, what were they thinking?
A lot of people have forgotten one of the essences of the scientific method is trying things and seeing if they work. That can be done without double blind studies. Double blind studies do eliminate subjectivity and the placebo effect. I have no idea why somebody tried willow bark, but it was found to help pain.
We have many people that are thinkers today. It is like Aristotle and Galileo. Aristotle though about it, and declared heavier objects fall faster then light ones. For most of the next 2000 years, educated people knew that. Then at the dawn of modern science, Galileo lugged the large and small balls up the the tower of Pisa, and dropped them off. They hadn’t read Aristotle, and both hit the ground at the same time.
People confuse science and thinking. Yes, it starts with thinking. The more theory you know, the more likely what you think will work, will work. It isn’t science until you start up the tower. So the ancient people boiled this and that until something worked.
Well, penicillin mold applied externally won’t help much, and the chances of getting Penicillin as opposed to something which will makes things way worse is very high.
And, I think that there is little period examples of doing this either.
I understand that there was a lengthy period of time where medical attention in the West was more likely hurt you than help you. IIRC, the odds approached 50-50 only in the mid 1800s.
There’s a world of difference between experimentation and hypothesis testing: the scientific method contains checks against the all-to-human tendency towards self-delusion. Furthermore, some treatments such as blood letting were grounded on theories developed in the absence of rigorous empirical evaluation.
Well first off that link leads to just two articles that make the claim as a throw away line. The rest of the articles make no mention of the idea at all. I would like to see some evidence that it was ever recorded from the ancient world.
More importantly, as DrDeth notes, the Egyptian pharmacopia recommended such ingredients as:
“entrails of moles, raw meat for bites of crocodiles and of men, male semen, and ‘Excrement-of-the-Adu- Bird.’ For burns ‘A-Frog-warmed-in-Oil’ and ‘Goat-Dung-in-Yeast-thatis-Fermenting’”
“Cure for Lesions of the Skin: After the scab has fallen off put on it: Scribe’s excrement. Mix in fresh milk and apply as a poultice.”
“Cure for Cataracts:Mix brain-of-tortoise with honey. Place on the eye and say [a prayer]”
“Pregnancy diagnosis: urine of pregnant woman: male child – urine germinates wheat, female- urine germinates barley.”
“mother’s milk was occasionally given against viral diseases like the common cold, fresh meat laid on open wounds and sprains, and animal dung was thought to be effective at times.”
So I assume that you believe that all those things works as well, that a scribe-shit poultice is a great thing to apply to broken skin or that and that animal guts, bird shit and raw meat are good thing to put onto open wounds and burns?
The fact that something was practiced in the ancient world isn’t indicative of a damn thing. As DrDeth says, there was such a huge amount of bullshit that some of the ideas must have been right out of pure blind chance. What I have not seen is any evidence at all that the cures used were any more effective than selecting ingredients totally at random.
As with parts of the Bible, some people want to latch onto the few “hits” in these ancient pharmacopias as evidence of knowledge. So the fact that Jews didn’t eat pork was due to knowledge of trichonosis, and Egyptians (allegedly) using moldy bread was evidence of knowledge of antibiotics. Meanwhile the fact that the majority of these documents are provably wrong is blithely ignored.
If anyone has any evidence that these ancient pharmacopias produce cures at any better than random chance I would love to see it. Until then I am inclined to believe that they are basically random selections of magic spells.
Note he does go on to praise some other techniques.
I’ve often said in the past:
To add to this, I’m not saying it all works, but in addition to techniques that may work purely by accident, there would be many others that have no effect other than placebo, but provided it doesn’t kill or be to the extreme detriment of the patient (in an obvious or immediate way, anyway), it will persist alongside things that actually work by accident.
We could fill up quite a few pages by reviewing every medical practice of ancient times that didn’t work. But I think the point of the OP is that quite a few modern medicines do have their origins in plant based compounds that were discovered because people and/or animals, using absolutely no scientific method or controlled studies, had already been self-medicating themselves with them since before written history and finding success. And it is far too common to be realistically considered a few lucky hits.
Animals other than humans have also had great success in locating plants that do actually help specific illnesses they have. As far as we know the rest of the animal kingdom is not subject to superstition or the ‘all too human tendency of self-delusion’, yet out of hundreds of thousands of species of plants available to them they have managed to isolate plants that solve real health problems, some totally out of their normal dietary range and likely very foul-tasting. They have no scientific methodology or documentation, no research labs or control groups, yet they have found remedies for illness without them. There is no reason to believe humans couldn’t and didn’t do the same thing.
Useless, dangerous, fatal or extremely detrimental to the patient in an obvious or immediate way. Practiced for millennia. We could also add the concepts of promoting infection to produce beneficial pus and numerous other examples.
Quite clearly treatments that were obviously dangerous and non-beneficial didn’t die out. Natural selection simply does not work on tradition unless there is competition, and there was no competition for these treatments.
Can you provide any evidence for this claim? How did you determine that it is too common to be a few lucky hits?
What percentage of plants contain potentially beneficial bioactive compounds without being overtly toxic (I guess around 90%).
What percentage were used to treat illness? (I guess around 100%).
What percentage were used to treat multiple illnesses? (I guess around 100%).
Based on those figures wouldn’t you expect quite a few botanicals to have some beneficial effect on the diseases they were prescribed for by random chance?
More telling is the use of non-botanicals, which don’t usually have beneficial bioctaive effects, and so have no chance of being useful by chance. And oddly enough we find out that rotten meat, dead frogs, fly dung and pus really don’t have any benefits.
Again, I would like to see some evidence that this is true. Animals eat all sorts of things all the time. I don’t even know how you would go about determining that animals eat things in response to their disease. For example, do animals without the disease never eat the material in question? Someone used the example of dogs eating grass, but my dogs eat grass all the time, an they are almost never ill when they do so.
I do wish people would stop perpetuating this nonsense. Aristotle did not just “think” to come up with his account of falling bodies, and Galileo, although he did do certain relevant experiments, did not do the experiment you describe; and if he had, it would not have proved his point.
In fact, most simple experiments you can do on falling bodies will, on the face of things, seem to give more support to Aristotle’s position rather than to Galileo’s. As Aristotle predicted, lighter bodies will fall more slowly than heavier bodies (of equivalent surface area), and rate of fall does depend on the density of the medium - things fall faster through air than through water, for instance. Very likely (although we have direct record of it) Aristotle actually did do such experiments. Certainly he did many other empirical investigations of natural phenomena.
By contrast, the relevance of Galileo’s actual experiments (which involved rolling balls down inclined planes, and timing them), to the phenomenon of free fall is not at all obvious, and working out the more general implications of these experiments requires quite a complex theoretical derivation, which took Galileo much of his lifetime to work out in a rigorous fashion. Furthermore, Galileo’s key insight was the meta-theoretical point that weight is irrelevant to speed of fall* in a vacuum*, and that actual motions in a medium, such as air, were best considered as deviations from the idealized situation of motion in a vacuum. The fundamental claims about motion in a vacuum were, of course, completely untestable in his time. (Speed of fall in a medium, such as air, does depend on weight, as Aristotle had rightly claimed.) Galileo proved his point not by an actual experiment, but by a thought experiment involving two falling objects of different weights loosely tied together.
Now, Galileo was right, of course, and his thought experiment was, arguably, one of the most brilliant and seminal proofs in the whole history of science. It is ironic that he relatively rarely gets credited for this (or indeed, for his rigorous, ingenious and painstaking series of experiments with inclined planes), and frequently gets credited with the conceptually trivial and empirically worthless experiment of dropping weights off the tower of Pisa, which he never actually performed, and never claimed to have performed.
Furthermore, when we compare Galileo’s methods with those of Aristotle, it is Aristotle’s conclusions that are more based upon empirical observation, and Galileo’s that are much more dependant upon theoretical considerations. Galileo got things right (or much more nearly right) not because he did more or better experiments, but because he interpreted his observations in the context of a more sophisticated (and much less intuitive) theoretical framework (one that he could never have developed, incidentally, if he had not had the relatively sophisticated framework of Aristotelian physics, and medieval elaborations and critiques of it, to react against). If anything, Galileo was the “thinker” and Aristotle was the “experimenter” (or, at least, the empiricist, basing his conclusions more closely upon observation).
The persistent myth of Galileo the experimenter versus Aristotle the theoretician may be one of the main reasons that the actual “scientific method” (inasmuch as there is such a thing) is so widely misunderstood (even by many scientists).
This is true. Both science and junk science start with an idea. Junk science proceeds directly to market. Real science takes time to do controlled experiments, even double blind ones to maintain objectivity.
I am afraid our school are teaching science as a body of facts, not a method. As a body of facts, it is subject to the same questioning as history. Thus we have copper bracelets for arthritis.
On dog forums, I see endless discussions about the ingredients in dog food, but nothing about what nutrients are available. With little troublesome data available, it is marketers’ heaven.