Science catching up to Indigenous healing practices
By Angel Parsons and Gabe Porritt
24 March 2018 — 10:48am
Tea tree oil is a staple of many modern medicine cabinets.
But long before it was sold at the local supermarkets and service stations, Indigenous Australians used the plant to treat ailments including colds and wounds.
Historian Lynette Russell says science is starting to catch on to medicinal and environmental knowledge Indigenous Australians have held for generations but progress is slow.
Contemporary environmentalists can learn from traditional Indigenous management of land through fire and their manipulation of the land to ensure food security.
More:
https://www.theage.com.au/national/queensland/science-catching-up-to-indigenous-healing-practices-20180324-p4z612.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
But take things like willow bark. It contains salicin. Not much, but a little, and in the stomach that becomes salicylic acid, aka aspirin. The willow-bark extract is a small help. Enteric-coated aspirin isn't the same as the folk cure, and just because salicin becomes salicylic acid in the stomach doesn't mean it functions as aspirin anyplace else.
For the most part, useful cures are "wisdom" that helped a little, but in the end could be vastly improved.
Few boast of the awesomeness of indigenous folk remedies in Europe. We mined that data a long time ago and feel no reason to try to restore indigenous dignity there. In fact, when I grew up there was a fair amount of ridicule for older indigenous practices there, ridicule that I haven't seen anybody careful to reverse.
A lot of folk cures simply aren't helpful. They go back to an availability heuristic that led to a conclusion held to be true for a long time through confirmation bias because there was nothing better, and it's always deemed better to do something than to do nothing. That's foolish, but doing nothing makes us feel helpless unless it's controlled doing nothing ("I order you to rest in bed" or "I've asked my sky person or sylvan god-oid and now we wait!"
, and we don't like feeling helpless. But if I shout "Ni-ni-ni-RAAAH" and a minute later my kid's fever breaks in a really stunning way and I'm in a little burg without a powerful shaman or established, really effective fever cure, my 'cure' will spread. Even, probably, if he has a relapse and dies 48 hours later because, well, he wasn't really better. But that would be "folk wisdom" that nobody cares about or ascribes to "indigenous wisdom" because it's just plain silly, and will only be cited by those who discount the brilliance of folk wisdom.
Still, if you're anxious to find something that might work, rather than randomly sampling each part of thousands of species against hundreds of pathogens for usefulness, may as well start with things that somebody else thinks work. Then, if those fail, you're no worse off--you've eliminated some of those species against some pathogens.
