Fair data point. But I could counter that e.g. trepanning died out, presumably because of the danger of mortality of the patient.
I suspect it it went the same way as tattooing, ritual scarring, tooth extraction, circumcision and many other useless and obviously dangerous traditional “treatments”. IOW it simply fell out of favour in our society. Many other societies continued to practice all those things until quite recently, and many still do.
Meanwhile in our society we replaced trephaning as a cure for mental illness with such techniques as beating madmen, starving them, straightjackets, excorsims, cupping and bleeding and a whole range of other techniques that were posed at least as high a risk of mortality and that were precisely as effective.
These violent and dangerous treatments only fell out of favour in the past 200 years. And it wasn’t because doctors realised they were dangerous. It was because society advanced to the point that the public became aware of them and disgusted by it.
I really can’t see any evidence that trephaning was abandonded for practical rather than cultural reasons.
Penicillin is not used topically for wound treatment. I have found some records which show mouldy bread was used- but as Blake pointed out- along with other things. For example, your cite " *It also centered on the remedies used to fight the infection in his broken leg. According to a specialist in ancient Egyptian medicine on the show, they would have spread honey on the wound and then placed moldy bread similar to pita on top (like penicillin). Bacteria and other harmful things cannot grow in honey so that would have prevented or treated most of the infection; depending on the availability of honey this could have either been easy or difficult to obtain. The moldy bread would have been easy to acquire as long as they had access to bread" *The honey actually works, in some cases, but it would have completely blocked any possibility of the chance penicillin mold getting into the wound.
And, altho Penicillium is a common mold, only a couple versions of it have any use as a antibiotic, and those are very rare. There are millions of molds, the chance of getting a useful strain of Penicillium is unlikely, and the chance of a topical apllication doing much is even more unlikely. Of course, other molds do have antibiotic effects.
Oddly bread is not a good place to find Penicillium chrysogenum. The strain that was first found to be effective was discoved on a cantalope.
I can’t find it, but IIRC there was a fairly recent thread about a study evaluating some large number of traditional herbal remedies and not one was found to work.
“It is estimated that today, plant materials are present in, or have provided the models for 50% Western drugs (Robbers 1996).” Evidence.
There are over 320,000 known species of plants, and most biologists think quite a few have gone extinct since before they started keeping track, and that countless others still remain undiscovered. Based on those numbers I think both of your guesses above are wildly inaccurate. Since you are asking me to provide evidence for my basically common-knowledge assertion that many drugs have their origins in plants I would ask the same of you. Please provide some evidence that all 321,000 known species of plants have been used in attempted treatments of illness.
Based on wildly inaccurate guesses I might expect anything. If you have evidence that the figures in your guesses are even remotely accurate then please provide it and I will take another look at the question.
I mentioned that dogs are commonly known (again commonly to a majority of dog owners - your own experience notwithstanding) to seek out specific grass, and / or plants when they specifically have indigestion, to the exclusion of other grasses and plants. I also provided cites for monkeys who have learned to eat charcoal to cure indigestion from cyanide poisoning, and a tree in Tanzania that both chimpanzees and humans eat the leaves from to cure parasitic infections. That is evidence.
There are of course many, many more examples but I will leave that to you as an exercise of your own to google and read them. I consider this to be common knowledge to the extent that cites shouldn’t even really be needed for us to accept the basic premise of the OP; that enough old remedies and plant based medicines did pan out to be effective under modern science that it poses an interesting question: how did they zero in on them without modern science? I don’t want to derail the thread in a protracted debate about whether or not they did. The OP believes they did, I do too, there is abundant evidence that they did. I added to the discussion that animals are still doing the same thing today guided by what basically could only be described as instinct. Citing examples of 100 failed ideas doesn’t change that basic assertion - but it does cut the OP off at the knees and prevent it from ever getting the discussion some might think it deserves.
I am a highly experienced dog owner. I say dogs eating grass to cure digestive problems is bunk.
The statement isn’t ‘dogs eat grass because they have digestive problems’ the statement is ‘dogs seek out specific grass or plants when they have indigestion’.
Specifically, they seem to pick a plant or grass that will make them throw up. If you as an experienced dog owner have never witnessed this I am surprised. But I don’t want to belabor that point when it has little bearing on the overall subject.
Monkeys crush leaves and rub them on their fur to repel parasites, elephants trek dozens of miles out of their way to reach a specific type of clay that cures their belly aches. As I mentioned, monkeys that have too much cyanide in their diet from leaves and seeds turn to charcoal (as did emergency room doctors and poison control centers). There is no lack of evidence on the subject in general with simple google searches. So splitting hairs about the dog/grass example is a waste of time. I’m sorry I mentioned it and I retract the statement that it is ‘common knowledge’ among dog owners even though it is pretty simple to google for it and find many discussions, including here, on the subject where many would beg to differ.
Umm, I may disagree with Blake from time to time, but he really know his shit here.
There is a HUGE difference between "present in, or have provided the models for" and actually usable as a medicinal herb as is. Willow bark is the example I mentioned upstream- indeed it is the origin of aspirin. But Willow bark is pretty damn useless as a medicinal herb due to severe side effects, ones worse than the cure. Many plant medicines are like that- there is a active ingrediant that is useful, but not in the native form, nor can primitive technologies have hoped to get anything useful. No amount of tinkering in a alchemical lab would have helped with Willow bark, no way to get usable acetylsalicylic acid from Willow bark as is.
There were a few of course=quinine from the cinchona, morphine & codeine from the poppy, and digoxin from the foxglove. There’s a number of others but in general, the amount of “medical herbs” known from pre-modern medicine days that are actually useful (without horrible side effects) are small. No doubt we have found thousands of plants that do have some uses- but only after we have removed the toxins, or concentrated the active ingriedants so you don’t have to eat a bushel to get any benefit.
That isn’t completely correct. Willow bark was not AS effective as purified aspirin but the fact that people discovered that chewing it cures fever and inflammation and aches and pains is exactly what the OP is asking about. How did those people, who have been chewing willow bark to cure their fevers since a known time of 400 BC, know to try willow bark? It was real medicine for real ailments. And there are 321,000 species of plants out there. Dumb luck? Trial and Error? Maybe instinct. That is the question at hand. Listing a thousand other stupid medical practices through the ages that turned out to be stupid doesn’t offer a legitimate counter argument to the assertion in the OP. People who were chewing willow bark when they had a headache and wanted it to go away existed and there were a lot of plants to choose from. I don’t claim to have the answer I merely argue that it is in fact a legitimate question.
But those compounds and the willow bark, etc. led to the isolation of the pure and far more useful extracts because crude and less-effective though they might have been, people and animals WERE already gnawing on the barks and chewing the leaves, of those plants specifically, to cure the very symptoms that the refined versions are used for today.
I never said willow bark did not help cure headaches, I said it tore up your gut so bad that the cure was worse than the problem. In other words, the side effects were so bad it was more or less useless as is. Nor did willow bark actually lead to aspirin.
Which goes no way at all towards answering the question I asked.
I asked what percentage of plants contain potentially beneficial bioactive compounds without being overtly toxic. I did not ask what percentage of drugs use plant materials.
The two concepts are utterly unrelated. If just 1% of plants contained bioactive compounds it is still possible that 50% of drugs would be botanically based. Conversely if 100% of plants contain bioactive compounds it is possible that only none of them would be used in medicine
So you have managed to totally evade the question asked.
What relevance do those numbers have to the question I asked?
I asked what percentage of those plants that contain bioactive compounds have been used to treat illness. I did not ask how many species of plants there are.
I never asked you that at all.
I asked you to provide evidence for you assertion that the medicinal effectiveness of quack cures is is too common to be a few lucky hits.
You have been unable to provide any evidence at all for that assertion, and so we can dismiss it as ignorant nonsense.
At no stage in this thread have I or anyone else contested that many drugs have their origins in plants. Your claim to the contrary is a blatant strawman. But it does highlight how ignorant your position is.
Since I never made any such claim, I can;t quite see why I should provide evidence for it. :rolleyes:
Let’s start with the basics here.
Please provide evidence that this is “commonly known”.
No, it isn’t.
Monkeys also eat dirt, carrion, birds eggs and several thousand other species of plants. When you have some evidence that monkeys without parasites do not eat that particular plant, then you will have some evidence.
Until then all you have is new age woo-woo.00
There is evidence, but we have to find it ourselves. :rolleyes:
Let’s assume it is “common klnowldge”.
It is common knowledge that the moon landing was faked and that crystals heal injuries.
Should we also believe those things? Or do you now begin to understand why “common knowledge” worthless in evaluating the truth of a belief?
So you want us to explain why the Kennedy administration faked the moon landings, and you don’t want to derail the thread in a protracted debate about whether or not they did.
:rolleyes:
Then show us any of this evidence. Any at all.
Not evidence that many of the plants people eat have bioactive ingredients. Actual evidence that they work any better than random cures.
You,made that claim, with no evidence to support it.
Yes, it does.
This is the forum for factual answer supported by evidence. If you want to discuss fantasy concepts without being bothered by pesky requests for evidence, go to IMHO. No need for facts over there.
Which in no way addresses the point Dr Deth was making.
There is no strawman here. Although I do detect a basic misunderstanding.
You quoted me as saying:
and to that you replied:
I took your request for evidence to be directed to my quoted statement “quite a few modern medicines do have their origins in plant based compounds” and not the second-half about it being too many to just be dumb luck. When you said “What percentage were used to treat illness? (I guess around 100%).**” **I took that to mean of all plants in general. In other words I thought you were saying you believed that 100% of all plants have been used in attempts to cure illness.
Points taken. The points you are presenting still have nothing to do with the OP. Despite everything you have said it is still factual and easily proven that people and animals have found quite a few remedies in plants and other sources and they found them before they had tried out nearly all 321,000 of them. We have already named 5 or 6 here and there are many more to be found with simple searches.
That is support for the statement that it seems improbable to have been sheer dumb luck. I back that opinion with the absolute solid evidence of animals finding natural cures for themselves that have proven chemical basis.
I never said or indicated that any of your arguments in the matter were ignorant. Just mostly irrelevant to the OP.
What it addresses, which I guess is an unpopular passtime in this thread, is the OP.
Imagine he was asking purely about willow bark and nothing else. How did they know? How did they guess? Did the first guy just walk up and slice of a piece of bark and chew it and noticed his rheumatic fever wasn’t as bad?
All I am trying to say, and I apologize if you took unintended offense, is that your arguments about ridiculous medical treatments of the past served little purpose other than to negate the premise of the OP which, I beg to differ with you, is a legitimate question.
The points I have been addressing are in fact the central premise of the OP.
Since nobody has suggested that any person or animal even had access to all 321,000 species, this is a blatant strawman.
You have asserted this 5 or 6 times, without providing any evidence to substantiate the claim beyond “it is common knowledge”. And I have asked you 5 or 6 times to provide this evidence. And you have refused 5 or 6 times
No, it does not support that statement at all.
Once again:
How many cures would these people have found if it had been sheer dumb luck?
How many ineffective cures would they have found if it were not pure dumb luck?
Are those numbers statistically higher or lower than the numbers that they did find?
Please show the working you used to calculate these probabilities
If you cannot do that then your assertions are baseless and support nothing.
For the third time, please provide evidence that animals that have an ailment use these “cures” more frequently than animals that do not.
You keep making this claim that they do so, and I keep asking you to show us the evidence, and you keep weaseling away from it.
Of course if ailing animals don’t eat these plants any more frequently than healthy animals, then in fact it is not being used as a cure at all. It is simply a normal part of the diet.
And as I just said, these points are central to the premise of the OP.
You are trying to argue the reasons why Kennedy faked the moonlanding, based on the fact that it is commonly known that the moonlandings were faked.
We are asking you to provide evidence that the moonlanding were faked at all.
If it is adressing the op, then you are being dishonest by quoting Dr Deth when you make the statement. That implies that it addresses Dr Deth’s point, when you now admit that it does not.
Really not acceptable behaviour.
People tried all sorts of remedies. The guy might have tried a boiled frog or the urine from a clerk. In other parts of the world people did use those things as their quack cures.
In that part of the world the quack cure happened to be willow bark, by pure dumb luck.
And there is no evidence that the use of willow bark does assist in curing rheumatic fever. Purified salicylic acid works, but do you have any evidence at all that willow bark is useful at all?
When you can produce evidence that willow bark does provide a cure for rheumatic fever, and when you can provide evidence that the use of willow bark occurs at a higher rate than we would expect by random chance, then you have some basis for discussion.
Until then you are trying to answer why Kennedy faked the moon landings without actually establishing that he did fake the moon landings.
And many people believe that the reasons why Kennedy faked the moon landings is a legitimate question.
On this board, dedicated to fighting ignorance, in this forum, for factual answers, negating such questions is the whole point of our participation.
The links I have already provided serve the purpose of establishing there is a basis for the OP. This is GQ not Great Debates.
The OP acknowledges that many folk remedies did not stand up to the tests of modern science, but that “some did”.
For the purposes of the question it doesn’t matter how many “some” is. As long as there is even 1, the question could be discussed in the spirit it was asked.
To step in and say “none of them ever did, case closed” is threadshitting. That is cutting the OP off at the knees.
I have provided cites in almost all my posts that do provide enough basis to discuss the OP.
The OP also never asked about animal remedies. I just added that to the discussion as a possible parallel to how early humans may have done it.
The link I provided about the chimpanzees and humans in Tanzania eating the leaves of a particular tree when, and only when, they get intestinal parasites is a cite that you request over and over, yet I have already provided it. The leaves are described as revolting, they are not in either species normal diet, and both seek them out when they get a certain parasite.
No, they don’t
That is in fact the central point. If “some” is less than random chance, then the phenomenon simply does not exist.
And we are discussing that, by pointing out that the discoveries were the result of random chance and the users did not even know if they worked. That is the answer to the question: pure, dumb luck.
:rolleyes:
Yes, just like when someone asked why Kennedy faked the moon landing, and the whoel board stepped in and pointed out that the moon landings were not faked.
That was threadshitting too, right? :rolleyes:
No, you did not.
And there is no more evidence for the animal remedies than for the human ones.
The link you provided never says that. One person claims that the plant is "is eaten… often in small amounts, by chimps that *appear *ill. No evidence is provided to support such a claim, no objective basis for illness is given nor any objective basis that chimps that appear ill are more likely to eat this plant as opposed to any other. Most importantly it does not say that it is eaten by chimps with helminth parasites, merely chimps that appear ill.
So I still await the evidence that chimps that are ill eat this at a statistically higher frequency than chimps that are not ill.
Please provide evidence for this claim that chimps “seek them out when they get a certain parasite”. Because the link you provided makes no such claim. It makes a baseless claim that chimps that appear ill may eat them ore frequently, but never links that to any specific cause of illness. Note that the article also states explcitely that “it is not certain that healthy animals never eat the leaves”.
So I await the evidence for this claim.