Indigenous peoples are frequently credited with having a veritable encyclopediac knowledge of the local plant life: what’s good to eat, what’s poisonous, what’s medicinally useful, what will let you talk with the spirits, etc. I don’t doubt there’s usually an extensive lore of such useful knowledge. On the other hand superstition is everywhere and entirely incorrect “facts” can have remarkable longevity. At one point Europeans were convinced that tomatoes were toxic for example. So what is the actual wisdom-to-bullshit ratio for indigenous plant lore?
Any reason why you are singling out indigenous people ? Europeans use herbs like echinacea and St Johns Wort for supposedly health reasons.
Hunter-gatherers are more apt to know the uses of all the local plants and animals than, say, Parisians, because nature is their livelihood.
Are you saying indigenous = hunter gatherers ?
Not sure where Parisians get into this. Are you saying that the hunter-gatherer Gauls (French ) were more into local plants before the Romans conquered them ?
Is this entire discussion going to about whether the OP was insufficiently woke, or does anyone have an answer to the question?
I am not aware of any scientific studies specifically done on plants used by hunter-gatherer communities just because they are used by hunter-gatherers.
“The term ‘indigenous peoples’ refers to culturally distinct groups affected by colonization.“ Indigenous peoples - Wikipedia
I am also not aware of any scientific studies done on all plants specifically used by the indigenous people (as defined above) either.
We do know however that 
“ In the United States, of the top 150 prescription drugs, at least 118 are based on natural sources: 74 percent come from plants, 18 percent from fungi, 5 percent from bacteria, and 3 percent from vertebrate species such as snakes or frogs (Ecology Society of America, 1997).” https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/publications/papers/Medicinal_Plants_042008_lores.pdf
That paper has some interesting statistics on plant derived drugs and their country of origin and it seems like it is from all over the world.
There is surely some (maybe a lot) woo in what people over the world consider medicinal and what exactly is proven by double blind control groups. There is also the dosage debate where chemical extractions are required for a plant chemical to be effective versus using them as is.
There’s not one simple answer to this- I mean, which set of indigenous plant lore? There’s basically an entire field of study, ethnopharmacology, looking at this. See the journal of ethnopharmacology for more info…
Dividing things into ‘wisdom’ and ‘bullshit’ is kind of the wrong attitude when it comes to indigenous medicine though. If you’re comparing, say, a leaf extract that doesn’t really treat the disease, but makes the sick person feel a bit better to the best modern medical treatment, the leaf looks like ‘bullshit’, but if what’s available is a leaf extract that makes them feel a bit better or not taking or doing anything, because you have no access to anything better, using the leaf may actually be ‘wisdom’, even if it is pretty much placebo.
You could, perhaps, examine a particular comprehensive list— for instance the Indian Medicinal Plants Database has a category of plants helpfully categorized as folk remedies — go through and check the references to see which ones have been studied as to effectiveness.
Apparently, some years back, a Chinese pharmaceutical company made a study of a bunch of traditional Chinese remedies, and found that the traditional remedy for malaria actually worked better than quinine. So clearly, sometimes the traditional lore is correct.
On the other hand, that was a study of over 200 traditional remedies, and the malaria one was the only one of the lot that outperformed the standard modern medical treatment.
On the gripping hand, that doesn’t address how many of the traditional remedies did work for what they were supposed to, just not as well as other options, or how many of them are similar to or even the basis of the modern medicines.
Willow bark is often cited as an example of the wisdom of the ancients. It does indeed contain salycilic acid, which does indeed work for easing pain. And it also causes a great deal of stomach distress. But then, some chemist figured out a way to modify the molecule into acetylsalycilic acid, which works just as well against pain but causes much less stomach distress, and so now we all use that instead of straight willow-bark, and call it “aspirin”. It may well be that there are other traditional remedies that work but with bad side effects, and that modern chemistry can use them as a basis for something that works better.
Props for the Motie reference.
Also was this study adjusted for multiple comparisons? If you roll the dice 200 times you are pretty much guaranteed to find one example where the test treatment appears better than the control just due to a lucky split that randomized the sicker patients into the control arm and the healthier patients into the test arm.
While there are certainly some traditional herbal medicines that do show clinical effectiveness (willow bark, digitalis, etc.). However, most of these have already been investigated by drug makers.
As the Tim Minchin joke goes:
Q: You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work?
A: Medicine
While there are numerous studies evaluating individual traditional remedies, there’s little in the way of comprehensive reviews of an entire culture’s folk medicine to properly answer the OP’s question.
One constant when it comes to “indigenous peoples”, it’s that despite all their wonderful nontoxic herbs, fantastic nutrition and superior lifestyles, they generally were disease-prone and suffered premature death much more frequently than in modern We$tern societies.
*a major difficulty in studying herbs/drugs used in Traditional Chinese Medicine is that a high percentage have been found to be adulterated with prescription drugs, harmful metals, animal thyroid tissue etc
** There’s very little incentive for sellers of herbs/folk remedies to do quality studies of their products. It can cost a lot of dough, and there’s too much risk of finding out the stuff is worthless. Best to rely on old herbals and testimonials.
Cite please. Are you saying Life expectancy in indigenous cultures compared to contemporary Europeans ? Or are you saying life expectancy in historical indigenous cultures compared to today’s European societies ?
Here is a world map of life expectancy in the 1800s. Indigenous Oceana had better life expectancy than Europe !
Also let’s not forget that many indigenous cultures were decimated when the white man showed up with diseases.
I think that this thread has undertones of implicit bias. Pre modern medicine, all cultures : Black, Brown, White, Yellow … all used plant or animal derived medicine. Many of these medicines have proven to be woo and some of them have proven to be useful.
“ Herbs, flowers, and perfumes formed a large part of everyday life in the Middle Ages and were inextricably linked with magic and medicine. Medicinal plants and herbs were an important and major part in the pharmacopeia. Medicines were made from herbs, spices, and resins. Dioscorides, a Greek, wrote his Materia Medica in 65 AD. This was a practical text dealing with the medicinal use of more than 600 plants in the second century.” [Bolding mine]
From : The Air of History (Part II) Medicine in the Middle Ages - PMC
If I’m not mistaken, the study is the one that came up with artemisinin.
Certainly applies in this case.
That they do; I once heard someone at Merck talking about it.
One of the reasons for preparing lists of medicinal plants like the one I linked to is to prevent pharmaceutical companies from patenting the useful ones:
Either I’m mistaken or Chronos got some details wrong. Artemisinin was not discovered by a pharmaceutical company, but rather a team set up by the People’s Liberation Army. And they evaluated some 5000 traditional remedies, not 200.
I couldn’t tell you what hunter-gatherer Gauls did if you put a gun to my head. You mentioned Europeans, so I picked an arbitrary city in Europe.
The OP made me think of the Bushnegroes of Suriname and tribes in New Guinea, both of whom are (or were, when I read about them) partly hunter-gatherers as well as experts at living off the land. My dictionary says that “indigenous” means “original inhabitants,” so I guess I misused or misunderstood the word. I still think what I said is relevant to the OP, though; if you can think of advanced civilizations that have been in the same place since forever and have vast knowledge of the local flora, let us know.
Jackmannii: “One constant when it comes to “indigenous peoples”, it’s that despite all their wonderful nontoxic herbs, fantastic nutrition and superior lifestyles, they generally were disease-prone and suffered premature death much more frequently than in modern We$tern societies.”
am77494: “Cite please. Are you saying Life expectancy in indigenous cultures compared to contemporary Europeans ? Or are you saying life expectancy in historical indigenous cultures compared to today’s European societies ?”
I think it was clear enough that I was referring to historical indigenous societies in contrast to modern Western ones. Example: the miserable life expectancies of Mesoamerican peoples, who, if they dodged the high mortality of childhood, could hope to live to 28-44 years of age (the following link is to the book that tidbit comes from; you can find the specific page dealing with life expectancy via a Reddit link)…
While praising herbs, flowers, perfumes and magick medicines of the Middle Ages, it would be wise to recall that their life expectancy stank similarly.
Yes, we’ve forgotten much of what the ancients knew - namely how to die prematurely.
As for intimations of bias/racism, it is rather patronizing to suggest that the people of less industrialized societies are better off with relatively primitive medical care. For all the hoopla about TCM, there’s been a drive by many Chinese in recent years to adopt that evil ol’ “Western” medicine, as if adherence to evidence-based care is a “Western” construct, which could be regarded as a stunning display of arrogance, if not bigotry.
The observation that many modern prescription drugs have their origins in herbal/plant-based medicines is certainly true. It is odd then to hear wooists who point this out, simultaneously claiming that drug companies won’t investigate medicines from plants because they can’t be patented. 
Undoubtedly the latter. Thanks for fixing the details!
You may not have been quite as wrong as I indicated. To quote the wikipage:
That’s where I got the number 5000. However, they were looking specifically for malarial cures and those 5000 were probably for a variety of diseases. So there may have been only a couple hundred that were for malaria.