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Yeah well, I wouldn't get overly excited on the efficiency of animals 'medicine'. Just look at human medicine 200 years ago and all those herbs and crap did lit
by MichaelRo 2y ago
Yeah well, I wouldn't get overly excited on the efficiency of animals 'medicine'. Just look at human medicine 200 years ago and all those herbs and crap did little more than placebo, when they weren't actively harming, but I suppose animals aren't stupid enough to ingest calomel.
Real medicine like antibiotics doesn't work in "raw form". Can't eat lots of Danish blue cheese and fight of a pneumonia or throat infection with penicillin. Leaving aside the difficulty of isolating and extracting enough pure substance, antibiotics need a very technically advanced (from a chemistry point of view) agent to make them last enough in the body to be useful.
Again, it's entertaining to see animals "self-medicate" but if this stuff worked reliably, humans would have picked it up looong before modern medicine.
- dannyw 2y agoHumans have picked it up a long time ago; see traditional Chinese medicine.
- dghughes 2y agoMore and more it seems of which, as it is in China these days, counterfeit. Whether the real stuff works or as much as claimed is not the issue. Spray painted or disguised components meant to look like the original plants, animal parts, fungus. Or worse a plant is substituted with something that looks or smells similar but will harm you. Plus using animal parts which can cause extinction of some species.
- Waterluvian 2y agoTaking direct medical advice from chimpanzees is indeed a bad idea. But we do learn a lot by studying animal behaviour.
- joelvalleroy 2y agoThey didn’t use ChimpGPT to write the papers and aren’t in a replication crisis yet so they’re really a few steps ahead!
- Waterluvian 2y agoChimp tenure is much less intense.
- jeffhuys 2y ago> humans would have picked it up looong before modern medicine We did. All modern medicine has its roots (heh) in plants. We might have distilled it down to its active compound(s) and increased the dose, but nature has it all. 200 years ago in the West it might’ve been all placebo (and literal snake oil), but the East had it figured out. Modern medicine is good, but we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.