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Plants, mushrooms and animals have contained active substances forever, it would be surprising that after millenniums of trials and errors, the people of this

Plants, mushrooms and animals have contained active substances forever, it would be surprising that after millenniums of trials and errors, the people of this time didn't settle on a few things that worked.

nwiswell 3y ago
Sure, but are there examples besides aspirin and opiates? Unsurprisingly those are pain medications, since it was immediately obvious that they work. The other class of drug that would obviously be recognized as effective are psychoactives such as alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. By contrast I can't imagine how they could judge the efficacy of e.g. blood pressure medications back in those days, even though there are purely herbal treatments like aged garlic that certainly do have an effect. ETA: This wiki article has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_by_year_of_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_by_year_of_disco... Another notable category of ancient drugs is laxatives. The first synthetic drugs did not begin to appear until around the mid-1800s. In 1832 chloral hydrate was produced, which was the first synthetic sleeping drug, but it wasn't used clinically until 1869.
- belenos46 3y ago
  Lots of examples. 'Thorsons Introductory Guide to Medical Herbalism' is, for example, both required reading for many modern medical degrees and a collection of hundreds (of documented; more realistically, thousands) of years of the medical practice of herbalism. And if you want some anecdata, I've used plenty of preparations from that text for nausea, fever, menstrual cramps (not mine, clearly), poor clotting, sinus congestion, and likely some things that are slipping my mind. Plants are where we get a lot of medicines from, and while modern pharmaceutical companies may prefer that information not get spread around (it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US), but the fact remains that if you know how to get the medicine out of the plant, it's still totally possible to do so.
  - tekla 3y ago
    > it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US Lol, the west doesn't do herbalism because if it works, we just call it medicine.
    - sonicshadow 3y ago
      The west doesn’t believe in herbal remedies because they aren’t patentable by the pharma industrial complex to make $$$
      - tekla 3y ago
        No, its because the west rejects the "wooo" and makes a pill out of the part that works.
        sonicshadow 3y ago
        Why take a thing that’s been known for thousands of years to be perfectly safe, when you can take this thing invented in a lab and tested on mice for 10?
        Drakim 3y ago
        > George Washington woke up at 2 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1799, with a sore throat. After a series of medical procedures, including the draining of nearly 40 percent of his blood, he died that evening. Old medicine and medical treatments were absolutely lethal compared to what we have in modern times.
        suoduandao3 3y ago
        Iatrogenic deaths are still incredibly high today. Modern medicine is the evolution of the doctors regarded highly enough to treat the president, not the people who filled their prescriptions in the woods.
        3y ago
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Pretty much everything we now use as herbal tea, if highly concentrated, will have a notable effect. E.G: Thyme has well known antimicrobial properties and thymol is (or at least was) a component of commercial mouthwash. Even when we don't make drugs out of the plant itself, it could have been used for the properties we know about today. E.G: common vervain is known to have diuretic properties, so it's not a long shot to think it has been used for this particular reason at some point. Today we use diuretic to treat heart failure, liver cirrhosis, or hypertension. While they may not have had any way to catalog all this, it seems unlikely nobody ever associated the consumption of a lot of diuretic with people getting better for one reason or another. People were not dumb, and there were a lot of them, for a long time. They likely tried a lot of combinations of things, on purpose or by accident.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > People were not dumb That people tend to think of our ancestors as being less intelligent is one of my pet peeves. There is no reason to even suspect that they weren't at least as smart as modern man. What they lacked was the accumulation of knowledge that time gives. "If I see further, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      Counterpoint, look around all all of the dumb people currently alive. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, true, but that giant is standing on a brobdingnagian mountain of stupid people.
      - DropInIn 3y ago
        Nah the giants are surrounded by the moronic commoners, not on them.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      Also, many of them were too busy doing repetitive tasks and didn't have time to innovate. Technology freed us from many of the repetitive tasks that were required for survival, so we have more available brain time. Also, improved communication helps us avoid wasting time discovering the same thing over and over. Medieval peasants had the same brain as we have, but without proper education, limited comfort and material means, days spent working the land, and slow and limited communication, no wonder much findings came of them. And because they didn't have the tools we have today, a lot of peasants were needed to keep the general population fed. Only the higher classes had the means to conduct proper research. Today, at least in developed countries, it is like all of us, including farmers are "high class". We all have access to knowledge, instant worldwide communication, and some level of comfort. Repetitive, draining jobs are still a thing, but on a global population level, we need less of them for survival. Not everyone is a genius, but we have a much greater pool of available geniuses, and their abilities are better exploited.

nwiswell 3y ago

Sure, but are there examples besides aspirin and opiates? Unsurprisingly those are pain medications, since it was immediately obvious that they work. The other class of drug that would obviously be recognized as effective are psychoactives such as alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. By contrast I can't imagine how they could judge the efficacy of e.g. blood pressure medications back in those days, even though there are purely herbal treatments like aged garlic that certainly do have an effect. ETA: This wiki article has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_by_year_of_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_by_year_of_disco... Another notable category of ancient drugs is laxatives. The first synthetic drugs did not begin to appear until around the mid-1800s. In 1832 chloral hydrate was produced, which was the first synthetic sleeping drug, but it wasn't used clinically until 1869.

belenos46 3y ago
Lots of examples. 'Thorsons Introductory Guide to Medical Herbalism' is, for example, both required reading for many modern medical degrees and a collection of hundreds (of documented; more realistically, thousands) of years of the medical practice of herbalism. And if you want some anecdata, I've used plenty of preparations from that text for nausea, fever, menstrual cramps (not mine, clearly), poor clotting, sinus congestion, and likely some things that are slipping my mind. Plants are where we get a lot of medicines from, and while modern pharmaceutical companies may prefer that information not get spread around (it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US), but the fact remains that if you know how to get the medicine out of the plant, it's still totally possible to do so.
- tekla 3y ago
  > it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US Lol, the west doesn't do herbalism because if it works, we just call it medicine.
  - sonicshadow 3y ago
    The west doesn’t believe in herbal remedies because they aren’t patentable by the pharma industrial complex to make $$$
    - tekla 3y ago
      No, its because the west rejects the "wooo" and makes a pill out of the part that works.
      - sonicshadow 3y ago
        Why take a thing that’s been known for thousands of years to be perfectly safe, when you can take this thing invented in a lab and tested on mice for 10?
        Drakim 3y ago
        > George Washington woke up at 2 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1799, with a sore throat. After a series of medical procedures, including the draining of nearly 40 percent of his blood, he died that evening. Old medicine and medical treatments were absolutely lethal compared to what we have in modern times.
        suoduandao3 3y ago
        Iatrogenic deaths are still incredibly high today. Modern medicine is the evolution of the doctors regarded highly enough to treat the president, not the people who filled their prescriptions in the woods.
        3y ago
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Pretty much everything we now use as herbal tea, if highly concentrated, will have a notable effect. E.G: Thyme has well known antimicrobial properties and thymol is (or at least was) a component of commercial mouthwash. Even when we don't make drugs out of the plant itself, it could have been used for the properties we know about today. E.G: common vervain is known to have diuretic properties, so it's not a long shot to think it has been used for this particular reason at some point. Today we use diuretic to treat heart failure, liver cirrhosis, or hypertension. While they may not have had any way to catalog all this, it seems unlikely nobody ever associated the consumption of a lot of diuretic with people getting better for one reason or another. People were not dumb, and there were a lot of them, for a long time. They likely tried a lot of combinations of things, on purpose or by accident.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > People were not dumb That people tend to think of our ancestors as being less intelligent is one of my pet peeves. There is no reason to even suspect that they weren't at least as smart as modern man. What they lacked was the accumulation of knowledge that time gives. "If I see further, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Counterpoint, look around all all of the dumb people currently alive. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, true, but that giant is standing on a brobdingnagian mountain of stupid people.
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      Nah the giants are surrounded by the moronic commoners, not on them.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    Also, many of them were too busy doing repetitive tasks and didn't have time to innovate. Technology freed us from many of the repetitive tasks that were required for survival, so we have more available brain time. Also, improved communication helps us avoid wasting time discovering the same thing over and over. Medieval peasants had the same brain as we have, but without proper education, limited comfort and material means, days spent working the land, and slow and limited communication, no wonder much findings came of them. And because they didn't have the tools we have today, a lot of peasants were needed to keep the general population fed. Only the higher classes had the means to conduct proper research. Today, at least in developed countries, it is like all of us, including farmers are "high class". We all have access to knowledge, instant worldwide communication, and some level of comfort. Repetitive, draining jobs are still a thing, but on a global population level, we need less of them for survival. Not everyone is a genius, but we have a much greater pool of available geniuses, and their abilities are better exploited.