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Self-medication by orangutans using bioactive properties of a plant
- ggm 6y agoIf we see them tending plants its s virtuous circle
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago"rubbing a foamy mixture of saliva and leaf onto specific parts of the body. Interestingly, the local indigenous human population also use a poultice of these leaves for the relief of body pains." Or: "Herbal medicine doesn't work"... I bet you all $25,000 of my own money and two decades of my life that it does work. How do you think we got where we are?
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI'll condede though, herbs will never be as powerful as pharmacologically extracted and concentrate and modified / enhanced molecules. Both have their place.
- Tepix 6y agoHerbs can kill you. Powerful enough, isn't it?
- DecoPerson 6y agoGood herbal medicine does work. (“Turmeric in tea to reduce inflammation”) Bad herbal medicine doesn’t work. (“Sage smoke for spiritual cleansing”) Pharmaceuticals work so much better in most cases. This all gets (incorrectly) summarised to: “Herbal medicine doesn’t work.”
- ketamine__ 6y agoTumeric seems unlikely to work. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/curcumin-will-waste-your-time https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/cu...
- temp0826 6y agoSage smoke allegedly kills airborne bacteria, fwiw https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17913417/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17913417/
- Angostura 6y agoHerbal medicine that works tends to be called 'medicine' once it has been corroborated and the active ingredient(s) have been isolated. Unfortunately, this tends to mean that what you are left with - the herbal remedies with dubious efficacy - get left with the herbal remedy tag.
- Ensorceled 6y ago“Herbal medicine sometimes does more harm than good, sometimes only works by the placebo effect, sometimes only relieves symptoms and masks the underlying disease, sometimes has been turned into effective medicine, sometimes has better modern alternatives, sometimes is just entirely useless and rarely just works.” ... is too long to write out.
- f6v 6y agoDigging up roots with a wooden stick works as well, and got us going for thousands of years. It's just that technology makes everything more efficient.
- dtech 6y agoNumerous modern medicine is derived from plants or traditional herbal medicine. Aspirin is the most famous example, it's the active ingredient of willow-based remedies. It's still a bad idea to drink willow-bark tea in lieu of taking an aspirin nowadays.
- niek_pas 6y agoInteresting. I wonder if orangutans would use pain relief medication as well, one which has no anti-inflammatory effects (e. g. Paracetamol). This would imply a subjective experience of pain.
- pvaldes 6y agoIronically, other species of Dracaena are among the most cultivated indoor plants. Everybody and its dog have one at home. I wonder if those Dracaena could have a similar effect. They have cutting finely toothed leaves so chew it or put it in the mouth does not seem a wise move in any case, (And to confound it by a Dieffenbachia would be a lethal mistake), but for external use... may work. Would be a really easy way for researchers to prove if orangutans feel any pain relief.
- bifftastic 6y agoThis is shown in the Wild Kratts episode "A Huge Orange Problem", first broadcast in 2012.
- amelius 6y agoIs there a sharp line between drug and food?
- throw51319 6y agoProbably wherever you arbitrarily draw the line of substantial or minimal effect. If you plotted the "effects" of every single consumeable thing on a graph. There would prob be a noticeable trough in the middle, and that would be your threshold for food vs drug. But for example, adding a lot of little things together can make a big change on your body composition and mindset...
- sebmellen 6y agoYou are what you eat. I'd say no.
- lucb1e 6y agoI'm not versed in this at all, but wouldn't one call "food" what sustains us in our current state and a "drug" what alters some aspect of us? (Paracetamol suppressing pain and fever, for example.)
- derefr 6y agoYou might describe an (ideal) food as something the cellular agents in our bodies take in to use as passive raw material for their own homeostatic processes. Most foods are not ideal in this way, though. But this still seems to be the ideal, as those things within foods that act on the body are almost always considered unwanted impurities in the food, not a desired “foodlike aspect” of the food. You might equally look at the other end of the spectrum, and describe an ideal... something as a substance that actively comes in and affects the body, without the body’s active help. The closest word for that “something” in English is “toxin.” But this is both imprecise (some toxins only act with the body’s assistance); and overspecific — “toxin” implies negative effect, but this “something” could be a positive thing (a chelating agent, for example.) “Drugs” don’t really hew closer to one side or the other of the “food” / “toxin” spectrum. Many of them are just chemicals your body should be making anyway but isn’t. Many do act directly on the body. And many interact with the body through mechanisms the body has in place specifically to allow exogenous chemicals to do that.
- intricatedetail 6y agoOrangutans should be happy they are not capable of creating a pharmaceutical industry. Imagine good chunk of population of orangutans in prison for using a plant. It's what humans did with cannabis.
- shadowmore 6y agoThis is the epitome of the "How does the collective well-being of society affect you in any way? Mind your own business!" take. Troubled people use drugs, including cannabis. Troubled people are prone to crime. Crime spreads and creates unsustainable living conditions for everyone. And that's not mentioning the destructive effect on culture and social interaction in general. "Live and let live" wasn't a viable outlook on life for thousands of years, and it won't be going forward. Libertarian fantasies were a brief anomaly in history.
- hiddencost 6y agoThis is false. Drug use rates are comparable among the upper and lower class, but we overwhelmingly enforce against the poor. Also, you should try some ganja, it might calm you down.
- shadowmore 6y agoAnd this is the flawed "it happens more to the poor, so it should be abolished" take. Something being done disproportionately doesn't mean it's wrong. It's a way of diverting away from the core point by appealing to victimhood. Though at the end of the day this all comes down to a fundamental disagreement between people who embrace human intuition and pattern recognition versus those who think those things are somehow uncivilized or evil -- a delusion orangutans, I'm certain, don't share.
- ChefboyOG 6y agoThis is the epitome of a straw man argument. The original commenter was suggesting that incarceration for consuming cannabis is irrational, not that citizens shouldn't be responsible at some level for the collective good of their society. Additionally, the implied causal chain you've laid out is fallacious. Ignoring the vagueness of what "troubled" means exactly here, if it is "troubled-ness" that makes someone prone to both crime and cannabis use, then clearly it is the troubled-ness, not the cannabis use, that causes the criminality. And if the goal is to reduce criminality, as is implied in your post, then whatever causes people to become troubled must be addressed—which, again, isn't cannabis, as it seems being troubled is a prerequisite to using it. This is akin to the classic example of banning ice cream to reduce the murder rate. Ice cream sales and murder rates increase in a correlated manner—but only because both increase in the summer. Also, as a final point, the fact that drugs like cannabis are criminalized turns any connection between cannabis and crime into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The real societal cost to the criminalization of cannabis comes via the violence and destruction associated with any criminal marketplace. The last time we saw massive organized violence between criminal organizations over alcohol, for instance, was the last time it was criminalized—i.e. during prohibition. But yeah, something something libertarians something something cultural decay.
- mdifrgechd 6y agoHere is a similar story from a couple years ago of lemures using chemicals from crushed millipedes to treat infections: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/lemurs-millipedes-medicine-madagascar-news/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/lemurs-mi...
- jungletime 6y agoSomewhat related: Why Do Parrots (And People) Eat Clay? https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/07/547981850/why-do-parrots-and-people-eat-clay https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/07/547981850/wh...
- ciconia 6y agoIf you observe animals long enough you'll notice they have that knowledge of plant properties, and will seek out specific plants in order to self regulate. I have watched my dog and cat seek out tansy (tanacetum vulgare) and rub themselves on it. Tansy is known to repel ticks and intestinal worms. The two of them regularly eat grass, dandelion and mint leaves.
- zachrose 6y agoIt's hilarious to say that an orangutan is "self-medicating." You mean it wasn't prescribed by another orangutan with a medical degree?
- cogburnd02 6y agoI think they may have meant it wasn't prescribed by a veterinarian with a medical degree.
- drewg123 6y agoIts interesting that there is a naturally occurring TNF blocker, when big pharma's TNF blockers (Humira, Remicade, etc) cost tens of thousands of dollars.