Where Did All The Medicinal Stuff Come From?

Well, some stuff goes back a LONG time! Asprin, and a lot of pro hormonal supplements have apparently been known for THOUSANDS of years. People only relatively recently analyzed then to determine active ingredients, and proved they WERE legit.

HECK, there was a legend in some countries about a huge human like creature that was black and white. Nearly everyone thought it was a crazy myth, TODAY? Well, they DID finally check, and it was eventually called the giant panda, though popularly, it is only called the panda. There was ANOTHER that was a creature called the creature of the forest. It was intelligent, lived in the trees, and had a lot of reddish hair. TODAY? It is called the same thing, but in the original language, orangutan.

As for chemicals? Some old aphrodisiacs turned out to actually work. And some work even BETTER than advertised. I have heard stories of dogs eating poisonous plants, and some people thinking they know better try to stop them, but the animals know of emetics and some that help with healing, and selectively eat them.

Steve

It seems like it. But you have to realize that this isn't why they grow, to help us.

All these herbs and plants would be here, even if we never used them for medicinal purposes. And, if you consider all the species of plants out there....it's a very small number that are useful to us as medicine.

Evolution would be the same, as long as we lived long enough to reproduce. Can we average 20 years of life, without medicines? Probably. That's all that's needed to pass on our genes.

And if we were human for 200,000 years, most of that time, we wouldn't have made these medicines available. Agriculture is more recent than we are.

I don't think these non-food medicines are part of our evolution, but they do help us relieve pain, and live longer, past our child bearing years.

It's just a thought.

4 not tied to the Bowl, but it's early.

I always wondered who was the first person to figure out that this herb will be good for you,
or alleviate this pain, or this mushroom is tasty and won't kill you, but this one will....

Dogs have been reclassified by some as omnivores and not strictly carnivores. Dogs actually have a tooth designed for eating plants, plus they'll eat just about anything and not just meat, like cats do.

IMO, if a dog is eating grass it's because it isn't getting a wide enough variety of nutrition in it's diet, often caused by owners that feed it too much protein.

Biz, chlorophyll is the compound you mean. Chloroform is how Claude used to get all of his dates.


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As for only a minority of the plants being useful for medicine? GOOD! GOOD! GOOD!!!!!! KEEP THINKING THAT! We WANT the FDA to think that!

It took a bit of looking, but one site has this, that is close to the original meaning: "Any chemical agent that affects the function of living things. "

By that definition, you COULD make a claim that an orange is a drug. Then again, even the FDA realizes that elements of an orange could be a drug, and specifically excluded them under the supplement act.

But even GRASS is related to things like wheat which is related to things like corn. And there was a family of plants LONG AGO declared DEADLY!!!!!!!!!!!! That slowed any person looking to that family for food. So WHAT are some common members of that family?

EGG PLANTS
POTATOES
TOMATOES

WOW, I guess it is good that someone found out they WEREN'T deadly! I like tomatoes and potatoes!

When I was about 7yo, I took some food to school to show an interesting thing I found. The POISONOUS item, properly prepared, was harmless, tasted like nuts, etc... Man, people thought I would die or something, but I ate the whole batch and it was just like eating brazil nuts or something. I can't take credit for it though, as I found out about it and the process by reading up on american indians that did the same thing. I heard somewhere that the poison was more alone the lines of something giving one a headache and being an emetic.

And what of things like willow bark? It was NOT considered a food and until relatively recently not considered a drug. What of tribulus, etc? IT is a drug of sorts.

Steve

Chloroform = chlorophyll when you are taking a phone reservation, talking to a new employee
about her tax forms, filling the hot tub, and posting on WF all at the same time. LOL

Go Broncos!!!

Oh, they are not in it this year.

Of course life forms are not going to evolve in any ecosystem that does not support them. Our course of evolution was most likely directed by which plants exist and our development dependent on the nutrient values in our ecosystem. That's not rocket science (seriously - it's not. It's biology, lol).

What is faulty with pharms is that they isolate active ingredients while everything else on the planet - and the planet itself is synergistic. Since corporations can't just claim to own a naturally growing plant, they must take an active ingredient and make a derivative to be able to sell and patent it.

One example of this synergy is the feverfew plant. It alleviates migranes. The pharms have tried for decades to isolate an active ingredient. They can't because the plant works via synergy. Same thing with lycopene. There's supplements, but independent testing shows that lycopene taken out of the synergistic factor doesn't do much of anything. Eat it in the tomatoes (cooked releases more of it) or other foods and it works. People pay a lot for supplements that are trash because they don't "get" synergy. That's the downfall of the pharms, too. Take the element out of the supporting elements, and sometimes you get something that turns from healthy to a little bit toxic.

And BTW - if Claude is eating elephant dung, count yourselves lucky. He could be flinging it instead.

There's a plant that looks like a wild carrot - even Indians have mistaken the two and poisoned themselves. Mushrooms bring the same problems. Animals do eat poison house plants now and again and I've never seen a dog that wouldn't eat chocolate. We're not completely innately smart about what is and isn't good for us. Smart enough that we've managed to proliferate, but we're definitely not omniscient about what is poisonous.

If she called me SOB, I would not read her posts anymore.
Ohhh - it was sob as in crying? OK then.

Ian - no clue on percentages. I'm not even sure how much would end up in tact as the actual element they started with. About all it says in most literature is "derivative". If it's one drug you are wondering about, go find the patent. That will tell the formula. I'm sure that a lot of things start out as elements of nature. Until recently, that's all there was. Not sure any more what's concocted how.

Pharms scare the crap out of me and I just avoid anything but aspirin or an occasional benedryll in an allergic emergency. You never know what you're eating without major research - which I would definitely do before eating them. If I have a problem I just go to pub med and search it down well. Some of the best, and most natural (read: no profit) cures don't make it into the medical journals, but they do have research done. I also look on "natural" med websites and if something makes enough sense, I go research that down on pub med to see if there's any scientific reality or if it was just hearsay on the website.

I know this - if they tell you "new" drug - stay the hell away from it unless you know for sure the trials are conclusive and over. The drug they had me on in jr high and high school was experimental - first it put me in a coma for 4 days when taken with aspirin and the doctors lied to my parents about me taking illegal drugs (which I didn't at that age so until my memory started piecing back together, I thought someone slipped me a micky). When I got to Germany and found that out, I was more than livid. Those *******s tore my whole life to crap for 4 years giving me experimental drugs.