Since I quoted several lines you didnt bother to quote, this is demonstrably untrue.
Next, you have the burden of proof, not I. I am not making claims- I am debunking your claims, for which your own cites are working wonderfully, thank you. Those who propose a hypothesis need to support said hypothesis, i can’t prove a negative. In other words, I can’t prove that animals don’t use some sort of herbs for medicine, you need to prove they DO. In fact, I agree with your cite- there’s quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that they might well do so. But there’s no (or very little) solid proof, and you own damn cite even says as much “*Most of the literature on self-medication is similarly anecdotal”. * Read your own cite.
And there is a number of herbs (I listed a few of them) which do have their basis in pre-modern medicine pharmacopia and are useful more or less 'as is". But the number is rather small. Most are useless or dangerous.
The argument was that animal self-medication has become a scientifically accepted phenomenon that warrants further study and even has a newly named discipline dedicated to its study that is accepted by the greater scientific community. While researchers remain unsure of HOW animals self-medicate, they have accepted as fact that they DO self medicate. My cites demonstrated that more than sufficiently, as do many others you can easily find yourself. The fact that the author of this one study, regarding this one behavior out of many he examined, accurately noted that it could be a happenstance, does not in any way take away from the fact that he clearly accepts animal self-medication as fact in general. The paper you are trying to second-guess, titled “The adaptive significance of self-medication” begins with the understanding that animal self medication is fact and then explores different ways it may provide evolutionary advantages.
These tiresome attempts to pick apart individual cites - when in their whole they definitely do settle that argument - are not doing anything to further this discussion.
How many herbs you personally believe are thanks to pre-modern medicine with no cites or substance to the claim is also irrelevant in GQ.
So CrazyHorse finds it tiresome that instead of people just accepting how he presents his cites, they actually looked into them and found they don’t support his central argument?
If you actually paid attention Blake’s questions aren’t designed to threadshit. They instead are highlighting the fact that without any evidence that animals who are sick are eating specific things that healthy animals from the same species would not normally eat there is no evidence of any deliberate self-medication. Even assuming the herb or plant that the animal is consuming does have medicinal applications in its natural form, if it is a plant that any animal of that species, healthy or ill, might eat at any given time, then there is actually no evidence of self-medication. Essentially all of your cites are just of that same type, saying “an animal that might be sick is eating something that might help with that illness” and they do not address at all comparisons of sick and healthy animals (not just those that look sick versus those that **look **healthy) to see if eating that herb is out of the ordinary.
Since you are happy to talk about anecdote, I will mention I have a 12 year old Standard Schnauzer that has eaten grass his entire damn life. Usually if I see him doing it I will try to stop him because sometimes if he eats too much he will throw it up inside the house. Most of the time though he just eats a little bit and then goes on with his life. Unless this dog has been ill his entire life, virtually every time he’s ever been outside, I think it’s likely he’s eating grass for other reasons. By the way, ages ago my veterinarian who is actually qualified to speak on such things, said that it’s not a big deal and some dogs just eat grass and there is no evidence that doing so is a sign they have any medical problems.
Right Martin. And then you’d have to find a herb that actually has proven significant medical effects without huge side effects. For example, there are hundreds of herbs that have been used to “fight infection”, but NONE do so in a significant way without worse side effects. Echinacea has been VERY widely studies- and it does have some substances that “fight infection/build up immune system”. BUT, many studies have tested echinacea to see if it actually does something as a herb, and the evidence is quite weak it may have a small effect. And that’s the best case scenario.
So, what we’d need is evidence that animals actually use such a plant only when they are sick, and only to combat a certain class of illness. Then you’d have to show that in the wild, that herb actually does have a significant effect, enough so that a animal would notice a cause and effect. Very very few herbs work as well as that.
The bear case study is a perfect example- sure, the bears do run that herb in their fur. But when? Is it only when they are sick, or just when they find it? Why? Do they think it makes them smell good to the lady bears? Or because it makes them feel better? Finally- there is little or no evidence that that root actualy does anything to “fight infection”. So, why would the bears use it to do that since there is no way they would notice a cause & effect after usage.
The cite mentions “anting” and there’s been a great deal of debate among ornithologists as to why birds perform that behavior. Perhaps Colibri, who is a well known international ornithologist will come by and give us the newest thoughts on that behavior.
I am certainly willing to accept that there’s a good deal of ancedotal evidence that animals do self-medicate, and that it needs further study. That’s different that there’s solid scientfic evidence that it’s common.
That is utterly incorrect.. Let’s take a look at the chronology of this discussion.
The OP asked (remember him?) although many pre-modern remedies did not stand up to the tests of science, some did. How might those have been discovered? What process was used to document their effects?
I replied to this that we don’t know but that today it is scientifically accepted that animals are able to identify, cognitively, medicinal uses for elements in their environments. Perhaps early humans had the same ability, or perhaps we simply looked to the animals and took cues from them about what plants might have medicinal values.
I hopefully awaited some intelligent replies from perhaps some of the slightly more qualified board members, to what I consider to be an interesting question. Sadly what I found instead the next day was a bunch of the predictable blow-hardish, unqualified opinions immediately rejecting the idea outright instead of giving any chance to any discussion of it. That essentially did threadshit if you look at the original question and what the discussion has become now.
When I insisted that animals can and do, and are scientifically accepted to, self-medicate in nature, **Blake **said:
So, when cornered by someone who is allegedly a scientist in this field to provide evidence about something that IS common knowledge and accepted as fact by the greater scientific community, I gathered about 5 or 10 cites that, in their whole, do absolutely establish that animal self-medication is a real science, a real phenomenon and that researchers in that accepted scientific field do accept as fact that animals can and do exactly what **Blake **asked for evidence about. It is being investigated by real scientists, they have accepted as fact that some of these cases are definitely due to a cognitive ability to seek out and obtain compounds with medicinal value to treat specific ailments that they suffered. How is there still any discussion going on about this instead of the OP?
It is an established fact. Not woo-woo.
When I provided the final cite in my series on the subject, which says:
I believe that Blake accepted that as the evidence he asked for to prove that a science he said doesn’t exist does exist and a behavior he said has not been accepted as scientific fact has been accepted as scientific fact. If he did not I have the impression that he will be able to speak up for himself without others telling me what he meant to say or why he said it. I gave him the evidence he asked for without any fraction of a doubt remaining.
The rest of these pointless and tiresome attempts by others to pick apart individual portions of some of the many cites just to create some illusion that they leave any remaining doubt is a complete waste of everyone’s time, not a real challenge to a fact that was established without any doubt long ago.
What you are ‘willing to accept’ and ‘reality’ are not necessarily the same thing.
Back in post #55 you accepted this as your ‘truth’ about maggots:
When in fact it is utterly, outright, wrong. The reality is the exact opposite.
Maggots, in their very specific use for medicine, were in the imaginations of pre-modern doctors and they used them for exactly what doctors use them for today. You were wrong.
Based on the fact that this is GQ, and you have presented something as being matter-of-fact factual information when it was actually just a two-bit opinion you pulled out of your ass, it is evidence enough to me that your irrational denials of this second reality, animal self-medication, must come from exactly the same source.
Yes, and “it was by random chance” is a valid response. Especially since, in the absence of any evidence otherwise, Occam’s Razor leads us to assume that must be what happened. That doesn’t mean it is what happened, but I do think there is a strong argument to be made that there is no evidence at all that any effective herbal remedies used by ancient man were discovered by anything other than random chance.
Even if we presume that animals do self-medicate there is no evidence presented the animals discovered it by anything other than random chance.
This all of course is also ignoring the fact that even most herbal remedies in which the plant contains a chemical that is effective at treating a certain ailment and in which ancient peoples used the plant to treat that ailment the plant based form often is not concentrated enough to actually be effective. So it is highly likely that the traditional herbal remedy had no effect, and it is just coincidence that the plant contained trace, and insignificant amounts of some chemical that is used in a modern drug.
The concept that animals could know “by instinct” what herbal remedy would cure a *specific *ailment opens up vast questions.
How did an animal diagnose themselves?
What biological mechanism would allow the animal to detect a cure in one of the 300,000+ plants in the world (obviously they do not encounter all of them in their natural range.)
This is actually a major point, because if we are to believe animals can instinctively find herbal cures then we’re positing animals have a totally unknown to science biological mechanism that can detect the presence of specific chemical compounds in plants and some sort of additional means of properly assigning those chemical compounds to specific ailments on demand.
Even the cite you picked out and posted yet again does not make this claim, only it makes the claim some observations might suggest this and are worth further study. You are now presenting it as a “proof” which strongly makes me question you in your entirety because anyone who presents such strongly worded proclamations about science are probably not looking into the science in good faith.
I don’t know everyone who posts here but on the occasional threads involving biology that have come up I doubt you will find a more qualified doper than Blake, or if there is one they have not posted as often.
“Accepted as fact by the greater scientific community” you have not shown any such thing. Your cites do not say any such thing.
Your cite which you believe firmly establishes your argument actually is not making the claims you believe it is making. If you actually read what Blake asked for he asked for evidence to the fantastic claim you made that chimpanzees who have a specific parasite eat a specific plant only when they have that specific parasite as a means of treating that specific parasite. Your article is much less, well, speculative. It says that some ruminants and other herbivores and Great Apes will eat certain things that seem to have a good ability to kill lots of parasites, and that they do this when they are carrying those parasites. It does not make the claim that chimpanzees can know specifically what parasite they have and then pick a specific plant to address that specific parasite.
You need to publish a paper with your findings if you have established this without any doubt you will win many prizes and acclaim.
Interestingly note how your cite shows people discovered that wounds cleaned by maggots healed better than those that did not become maggot infested: dumb luck. That is another direct answer to the OP.
They saw something that happened and made a conclusion based on that. They were not doing any studies or tests, but just essentially observing something that *happens by itself. *I do not know how else I would answer a question about the discovery of that other than, “well, dumb luck.”
As the Wikipedia article you copy and pasted from on maggot therapy shows, modern scientists did studies based on older knowledge about maggots, but that wasn’t until the 20th century.
Im going to take out their cites since they might make it difficult for some to follow the flow of the sentence and add some bolding:
While little is known about the abilities of animals to self-medicate, and many of the observations are anecdotal and equivocal, there is evidence animals self-medicate.
That pretty much settles the only point I was ever arguing.
As to the rest I agree completely that random chance could be involved in both human and / or animal medication. I never said that I believe as a fact we discovered remedies the same way animals are scientifically accepted to do, I just said it was a possibility. More likely even still is that we just watched them and learned. I am open to all opinions on the OP and I have not argued with any of them. I am arguing to support my small addition to the subject and I was surprised to find so much opposition to something that is just common knowledge. I provided the cites and they do establish my argument. They were never intended to establish any definitive link between the OP and animal self-medication, they were just to prove it happens in the animal kingdom too and scientists are trying to figure out how. The answer they one day find, my GUESS, will be related to the answer to the OP.
I am glad to see the thread taking somewhat more of a turn back toward the OP and not my theory on a link between it and animal self-medication. I hope it continues.
I couldn’t agree more. Maggots infested the wounds, and some very astute medicos of the day noticed the benefits and through open minded observation of the reality around them they allowed it to become a part of accepted modern medicine.
Does not = accepted as fact by the greater scientific community, at least to me.
It’s a fact that the sun is the source of light that provides natural illumination during the time we know as “day.” It is an argument that animals have an ability to self-medicate.
It might be a fact that chimpanzees eat a certain herb, it is an argument that they are eating it for a certain reason.
I notice you still have not addressed at all the fact that you tried to make the claim that chimpanzees were eating one specific herb to cure one specific parasite. When even your cites do not suggest anything so fantastic. They instead suggest that animals who are parasite infested ingest specific plants that are known to kill parasites in the body.
Your original claim is akin to saying an animal has some way of knowing what parasite they have and goes to the equivalent of a pharmacy and buys a very specific drug for treatment of that specific parasite.
If we agree with the suggestions in your cite, what instead is being argued is that parasite infested animals eat things that can kill some parasites–but with no guarantee it can kill the specific parasite that is infecting them.
I don’t know what else to say except that is irrational.
We can start at a more basic level, here is the Wikipediaarticle on the science. From there, take some of their cites, and the individual scientists named in the article (Jane Goodall, etc.) and then do some research on their research, combined with the scientific journals on the subject, societies, etc I recall one of my cites was from the center for primate self-medication research at kyoto university, look them up and do some reading. It is accepted by the greater scientific community as officially as any other accepted school of science.
I see no point in continuing a discussion of it based on these simple “Is not” arguments.
At this point it is you who is arguing against something that is proven. The onus is no longer on me to keep trying to persuade you of a basic truth. Provide some links demonstrating any examples of Zoopharmacognosy being debunked by any scientific study. There are thousands you can find easily that support it.
Oh so now I am arguing that it is COMMON? When did this new twist get added to what I need to defend? Before I was simply arguing that it existed, at all, I seem to recall even saying if “even 1 case turned out to be true” that would be worthy of discussion in the context of the OP. Now that that has been established you think that you can just sneak the word “common” in and continue arguing your irrelevant, uneducated, personal opinion on the subject?
I am under the impression that mostly, if not wholly, all you intend to contribute to the conversation is your opinion. There are other boards for that.
While you’re asking **Colibri **about anting, ask their opinion about Finches self-medicating from my earlier cite:
And if, in consideration of the OP, the premise of animal self-medication is a valid idea to bring to the table.
I hope I haven’t neglected anyone…fighting ignorance in this thread has turned out to be harder than I thought. My final cite on the subject, lacking any intelligent discussion of it, is below. It is of course but one small part of a larger paper, of a larger institution that is part of a larger scientific community, all dedicated to the science and as such may not, by itself, address each and every ill-founded challenge to my statement of basic common knowledge down to the letter. But I think it comes pretty close. I would encourage anyone with any lingering doubt to educate themselves on the matter and not rely on me to do so. I have provided ample material to lead you to further reading on the subject.
Actually all the cites you listed and even the wikipedia article are talking about an area of ongoing research. What I’m protesting is your use of the word “proven” which comes from the word “proof.” Scientists do not assert that they prove things, and you shouldn’t either–because no scientist will back you up on that. Mathematicians can prove things beyond any doubt, scientists do not. Science is about trying to falsify things, and when something has stood up against many attempts at falsification, then it becomes generally accepted.
Where we are right now on animal self-medication is “several researches have proposed this might be something that is happening.” Your own cites say this, your own cites do not say it is absolutely proven fact, only you say this. I grow extremely tired of you saying “This is absolutely proven fact” and then giving me cites that say “this is something that coincides with several observations and while science does not know much about this area we think this and this might be valid conclusions etc etc.” And there is nothing wrong with that, I don’t have any ax to grind against those scientists because they are doing the right and scientifically proper thing, they’re exploring avenues of research that seem credible. However until rigorous attempts at falsification have happened, I think you are blatantly misrepresenting the situation to say that this is “accepted fact by the greater scientific community.” It doesn’t really appear to be the case that the greater scientific community has really significantly gone about rigorously investigating this.
I’m starting to wonder if you are just extremely uninformed on how research works. You do realize that just because you can find a few dozen articles, all of which mostly say here are some examples of something we think might be happening, that isn’t the same thing as saying it is accepted by the greater scientific community. There are dozens of published articles asserting HIV is a harmless passenger virus that does not lead to AIDS.
But to reiterate, I have no problem with your cites, I have a problem with you saying something that has basically been touched upon a bit in a few publications is the equivalent of a “proven and accepted fact.”
It is not common sense proven fact. It is a hypothesis with some evidence to support it that has not been rigorously tested. Most of the citations to people like Goodall are not citations referencing papers that have done any sort of intense investigation but are instead references in which researchers have observed animals eating certain things.
I’m not against a belief that animals self-medicate, by the way. I want to reiterate that. I’m against the claims it is commonly accepted fact that animals do so.
More specifically what we’re talking about is this:
This thread is about certain ancient remedies, such as willow bark, containing salicylic acid which is used in modern medicine to treat the same ailment as the ancient remedy (that’s just a single example.) Willow bark was used to treat headaches, willow bark = aspirin and aspirin is used to treat headaches. So somehow the ancients got this one “right.”
So then the idea is presented that animals can, through unknown biological mechanisms, identify cures in the wild and self-medicate. Where you really roused up debate is when you specifically said this:
I don’t have any problem with this idea:
“Humans and animals throughout history have eaten all kinds of stuff. Sometimes these things made them sick, humans learned to avoid eating things that made them sick and passed that knowledge down through the generations. Sometimes a human might have an ailment and he might eat something, and then that ailment went away. Humans passed down knowledge that the plant cures people of that ailment. However, many, many, many times the ailment actually just went away by itself and it was pure coincidence that they had eaten a given plant. However, throughout the entirety of human history sometimes these folk cures did end up containing compounds that had medically relevant applications. However there are also many that may have contained medically relevant applications but were actually used in the ancient world to treat totally unrelated ailments.”
Basically what that says is, humans made lots of connections between their health and what they ate, most of them wrong. Sometimes those connections proved true. However even for ancient remedies that actually have some meaningful medical use today, it is worth noting they were often prescribed for hundreds of ailments, many of which they would have done nothing at all for and many of which they might have even exacerbated. This is evidence that the humans did not really come to the conclusion “ah, this is good for stomach ulcers.” Instead it was more like “here is something that will help stomach aches” and it did actually help stomach ulcers, but for hundreds of other causes of abdominal pain it did nothing at all, and may have even caused worsened condition.
Then you come in with a claim that animals self-medicate with great enough success that we must conclude it is due to something more than just sheer luck. You have not really said what mechanism you think it might be. If you now concede it may have just been sheer luck–then great, I don’t have a beef with that.
I do still need to point out that even your cites do not make the claim that sick animals know how to specifically treat specific ailments. For example you suggested that a chimp could seek out and eat something to rid itself of a parasite, and that it only ate that particular thing when it had parasites. Parasites cause many problems that are indistinguishable to the sufferer from say, a virus. There is no way a sufferer could know without a medical examination if they’re infested with some parasite in their digestive tract or they have a virus. I do not believe chimps have any way of knowing “ugh, stomach problems–must be a parasite.” I do believe it possible through their “search for homeostasis” that animals have stumbled upon certain things that they associate with “make stomach feel better” and that when their stomach is bothering them they might eat those things. I believe that because all these cites you have given have never said animals are treating specific infestations but instead making the claim that animals eat things that are known to them to relieve specific symptoms such as stomach problems or et cetera.
For example one of your cites talks about ruminants eating a certain thing when they have a problematic infestation from an intestinal parasite. This thing has an ability to significantly reduce parasite load when eaten. Okay, cool. But is it not more likely that the ruminant has somehow (and I don’t know much about animal thought patterns so I apologize for anthropomorphizing) said “stomach pains…this grass makes that go away, nom nom” than the ruminant said “ah, I have another infestation of this specific parasite and I know this species of plant is an effective cure for that!”
However, since it is “stomach pain” that the animal is responding to, they are no more likely than ancient man to be “getting it right.” Since ancient man consumed a certain plant for all stomach pains, but it only helped a few specific causes, I would assume that any plants animals eat for stomach pains only alleviate a few specific causes of stomach pain. I would likewise assume since the animal or the ancient human typically responded to generalized symptoms, they did not have any way of distinguishing one specific ailment from another, especially since many ailments have very similar symptoms.
This is basically true (though I think it may have taken a few more decades to escape the probability that you’d be worse off, and to exceed the break-even point). Compare that to the less exotic alternative treatments such as herbalism that existed up to that time, and you were probably facing 50-50 odds all along. Bottom line in the old days was that you probably were taking less of a chance following folklore use of plants than you were going to the doctor who practiced bloodletting.
That’s how a lot of remedies got enshrined in folklore. People who employ modern woo are still good at convincing themselves that it works despite a lack of evidence, and remain devoted to homeopathy, ear candling, reiki, Miracle Mineral Solution, herbs long discarded from the materia medica due to ineffectiveness and/or hazards, and a host of other treatments.
It’s fascinating to read about the history of herbal treatments, including those devised because the plant in question was thought to resemble the ailing organ (for instance, Pulmonaria (lungwort) which has spotted leaves believed to resemble lung tissue (I can’t really see it)), or in cases where a complex mixture of almost entirely ineffective herbs was employed and worked because of one active ingredient (digitalis is the great example here, figured out by Dr. William Withering when he looked at a combination herbal remedy that had some success in treating heart failure patients).
I don’t know what else to say, except that is irrational, and also not what you were originally arguing at all.
I would go back and re-quote you saying it was a ‘fantastic claim’ that chimps only with a parasite, eat a plant, only when they have a parasite, and that there is an apparent cognitive link between the parasitic infection and the plant eating.
It is established, your personal opinions are bunk, and they have no place in GQ.
Also as cited in one of my earlier posts the English doctor who first documented willow bark helping fever chose the study because willow trees and fever seemed to both occur in swampy areas. Misguided in his reason for selecting it, he wound up selecting the right plant for the right ailment. Random chance plays a role in the discovery of many things beyond medicines.
Hereis another example demonstrating that simply observing what animals do for natural remedies has allowed human observers to exploit the information and develop new, effective, drugs for humans.
This is a direct answer to the OP. Not the only answer, but a factual answer out of a whole bunch of personal opinions I see here. Obviously random chance plays a role in almost everything, so it isn’t a particularly informative or novel answer. The more interesting aspects of the OP I think are the ways we discovered remedies other than random chance. One such way, as I know I must have stated somewhere or other in this thread, is looking to animals since they have the proven ability to self-medicate and we are pretty good observers.