I usually balk at herbal cures, but it's actually a really dumb thing for me to do, eh? Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab.
I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think.
> Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab.
It's the other way around - most of the drugs we have are reverse-engineered plants. But there's nothing nature can do that we can't do better once we know how it works. What we do is, we take from nature the parts that actually do the healing and refine them, and we throw away the irrelevant rest.
The reason some old herbal cures may be worth looking for is that it's likely that there is yet another plant-based substance that we could turn into actual, much more powerful medicine.
An example of this is the single most used medicine ever, aspirin.
"Plant extracts, including willow bark and spiraea, of which salicylic acid was the active ingredient, had been known to help alleviate headaches, pains, and fevers since antiquity. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (circa 460 – 377 BC), left historical records describing the use of powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help these symptoms.In 1763, Edward Stone, at Oxford, isolated the active ingredient of aspirin in his discovery of salicylic acid."
We lose a lot when the oceans and rain forests are destroyed beyond repair including chemical compounds, proteins, and processes that have taken eons to evolve which we have not yet discovered.
How important to medicine are the ancient remedies derived from poppy and coca leaves?
On the flip side, there is this essential oil, naturopath movement posting things on my Facebook stream about how tea tree oil is a natural antibiotic and to use it on everything. Unfortunately, tea tree oil is effective against MRSA which is now developing resistance to it because of careless overuse by the natural health community. There are dozens of products at Whole Foods that contain it but not at therapeutic levels so one of two things are happening, first, people are killing bacteria on their skin which for the most part is beneficial and, second, bad bacteria is developing resistance.
> I usually balk at herbal cures, but it's actually a really dumb thing for me to do, eh?
No, you're in the right direction. The difference between a folk remedy and medicine is a lot of scientific inquiry, peer review, and reproduction of results. It's an error to lump folk remedies in with scientific findings. That's not to say folk remedies don't work; it's to say we don't have much objective proof that they work.
I'm fine with making objective proof (through hypothesis testing, precise measurement, reproducible results, etc.) my threshold for acceptance.
> there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think
Certainly. We should say, "Wow. That's worth some scientific inquiry to see if and how it works."
It's not worth cutting corners on this stuff. Some plants interact with medication or affect fetal development. We need experimentation and trials to rule out negative effects as well as prove positive results.
That is a quite odd stance to have. A very large part of modern drugs does come directly from plants, and are only later on produced synthetically, if it has the desired effect (and can be produced cheaper or cleaner synthetically)
Well, just like modern/western/industrial pharmacology, traditional medicines range from Very Effective down to Actually Quite Bad For You ... and their efficacy and safety are heavily influenced by the preparation method, dosage, the subject's physiology, other medications (including food) being taken, and so on.
So while it's not 'really dumb' to discount any traditional medicine because it wasn't made by a profit-driven multi-national corporation, it perhaps indicates some naivete regarding the provenance of many current 'modern' medicines. Some casual reading on digitalis, neem, cinchona, and willow bark may be enlightening -- most people on the planet, including you, have almost definitely used at least one of those (or, I'll concede, a synthesized version of the active chemicals taken from those plants).
There's some great resources on the net that speak to the role of plants in modern medicine - apart from the story you just read - keep in mind how many $'s have been spent over the past hundred years trying to come up with a synthetic cure for malaria.
People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct. But just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work. Some of them does work because of trial and error.
Consider how the original discovery of a poison is made the hard way. It's morbid to think, but someone probably died to figure out that some plants are poisonous. Now extend that to thousands of herbs that may treat pain such as weed or may treat gout. Its not an efficient process but there was an observer that recorded the data when someone took a herb. That observer may not have recorded the data but s/he may spread it by word. This is sort of like an expert that gives small weights to its neighbors in a training group. So over time and through many iterations (sort of like a training group that iterates through many cycles), some final accumulated "common truth" is collected. That is analogous to a fuzzy logic or probability in whether a herbal medicine may work.
But that's with only 1 herb. Even with just 1000 herbs, a 2 herb combination is already half a million. You see how inefficient that is? Even with over 6000 years of human history, the trial and error is still very limited in drug exploration. So just because theres no recorded data of the tests that it doesn't mean it can't work.
Except we have no idea that traditional medicines were developed by effective trial and error. It's more likely that some mystic just declared some arbitrary potion to be medicine for some arbitrary disease and the placebo effect, appeal to authority and the desperation of sick people did the rest of the work popularizing them. The ancient Chinese used the positions of the stars to help choose their medicines. This ineffectiveness is shown by the fact that the traditional recipe Tu found actually involved destroying the active ingredient by boiling it! Clearly the original authors didn't know if it worked or not, since it didn't but they still recommended it to patients anyway.
Today in China, almost everyone still uses traditional medicines. It's a massive national problem. They use them for minor diseases like colds and coughs and continue to believe they're effective because "I took the medicine and a few days later I recovered". The medicine companies are ripping off uneducated poor people and the "medicine" doesn't deserve any respect other than as a source of compounds to test using actual science. The scam is reinforced by doctors in hospitals who often prescribe a combination of traditional and modern medicine so that the modern medicine does the work while the (sometimes more expensive) traditional medicine leaves an opportunity for the patient to credit it instead.
> People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct
Maybe we have different definitions of "unscientific". It doesn't mean the same as "works well".
> just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work.
No, that just means they are unscientific.
If we want people to stop treating science like magic, we need to stop conflating "effective", "natural", and "is consistent with scientific findings" with "scientific".
If your experiments are not reproducible, it's not scientific. If the experiments and observations don't deal with sufficiently precise measurements (no '3 pinches of this'), it's not scientific. If it can't be tested with prediction, experimentation, and observation, it's not scientific.
That's not to say it's wrong or that collective discovery isn't a thing. It's just not science. This is important because collective memory can be right, but it can be wrong. Folk medicine says things like "pregnant women should eat protein to have a boy" and "rhino horn cures diseases of the pancreas". We need a way to collectively vet these hypotheses. That's what the scientific method is for.
"People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct. But just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work. Some of them does work because of trial and error."
Some of these herbs might work, but I imaging it's all do to the Placebo Effect.
If uneducated people want to ingest herbs--I really don't care. The problem is these people are killing Tigers, Bears, Rhinos, etc. falsely believing they will be cured of their alignment.
These people need to be educated. I am really bothered when I see another animal killed out of absolute ignorance, and tradition.(an unexamined tradition is just a folk tale?)
A well done double blind study is beautiful. We can argue about standard deviations, etc, but the studies need to be done.
Herbs great! Just leave animals out of the mystical cures.
Personally, I would think like this. Not matter it is herbal cures or chemical medicine, I only trust the one comes from the true scientific process like double blind tests.
I wont say the traditional Chinese herbal medicine is absolutely crap as some of current wonderful medicine is the extraction of plant.
Many people think so, to the point there are people who create medical problems for themselves by drinking large but feasible amounts of 'harmless' herb teas for enjoyment.
Some of them have effects such as lowering or increasing your blood pressure, for example, and that's everyday herb teas from the supermarkets. Not a problem if you drink one or two cups (most effects are small), and not a problem if you're not vulnerable. But if it's all you drink.. well.
As many others have pointed out this is exactly where a lot of our medications come from. We isolate a naturally-occurring chemical, refine it to make it more potent or eliminate unwanted side-effects, test it, then release it as a drug.
I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think.