Growing a home apothecary
worldsensorium.com
worldsensorium.com
It's unfortunate, but with the way things work in the western world currently, it isn't in anyone's commercial interest to invest in proving the efficacy of any of these herbal remedies. They aren't patentable (because they're plants and because there's prior art), so even if you were to sponsor a trial that statistically proves a remedy as effective, there is nothing to stop your competition - established pharmaceutical manufacturers - from jumping on the bandwagon and eating your lunch. It just doesn't make commercial sense for anyone to invest time in them.
I'm not here trying to insist that big pharma out to suppress natural medicines or whatever, or that it's some big conspiracy (or that it's not). I'm just pointing out that there's a logical, commercial reason that the we don't categorically know how effective these plants are. There are many examples of this with non-organic compounds also, that have shown therapeutic potential but are no longer studied for their benefits because too old to be protected by a patent.
Some pharma labs already do this. Most of the 50 supplements I take are made by the same labs that make prescription drugs. On the plus side, they are very good at consistent measurements. On the minus side, some of the supplements I take were actually drugs that failed approval. They still work for what I use them for, but not for what they were intended. I've come to understand they make just as much money from supplements as they do from prescription drugs given they do not have to pass the same scrutiny as prescription drugs. I use a red leaf extract that was meant to be a blood pressure drug but I can see why it failed as it is the most powerful diuretic I have ever used, meaning one can not sleep when using it.
One of my favorite examples that I do not use is Viagra. It was also meant to be a blood pressure drug but failed. It had a unique side effect which led to a marketing team coming up with the term "Erectile Dysfunction" which is now considered a medical term.
this is where i'd hope a prestigious medical school would step in to do the studies.
That said, I'll definitely keep more of an open mind now.
I was whining about it one day to a friend of mine who was in his 70s and had been a pilot for the military and flew missions all over the world. He learned on lot doing that. He told me "Raw honey will cure that if you take a tablespoon every day for a few weeks" and explained it was actually an infection that the honey would kill.
He was right. I bought some honey from a local bee keeper and it was exactly two weeks later that the pain was entirely gone. Right about that time a neighbor of mine stopped by and mentioned he was going to the hospital for an operation for the same thing in two weeks. I told him about the honey and he got some from the same bee keeper and it cured him too.
Most doctors won't tell you raw honey will cure that. Most probably don't even know it will.
Guess we all better cancel those annual checkups!
> We define death due to medical error as death due to 1) an error in judgment, skill, or coordination of care, 2) a diagnostic error, 3) a system defect resulting in death or a failure to rescue a patient from death, or 4) a preventable adverse event. The prevalence of death due to medical error leading to patient deaths has been established in the literature. From studies that analyzed documented health records, we calculated a pooled incidence rate of 251,454 deaths per year.
> (1) If we project this quantity into the total number of deaths in the year 2013 (2,596,993 deaths), they would account for 9.7% of all deaths in the nation.
> (2) This figure far surpasses the current third leading cause of death on the CDC’s most recent rank order. Moreover, the 251,454 estimate we derived from the literature is an underestimate because the studies conducted did not include outpatient deaths or deaths at home due to a medical error.
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2822345-Hopkins-CDC-...
> Bursitis generally gets better on its own.
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bursitis/diag...
So it was not, and did not, get better on its own.
You can ignore what I've shared here if you want, or you can choose to learn something from it. I am very grateful for the person who told me about.
Real honey has so many more flavours to it, and it varies depending on the type of flowers they feed on and the time of year. Find some local beekeepers and try their honey.
Search for monastery medicine for more info.
eg. Chamomile - still used for bad stomachs (is a costive), whether it works on herpes simplex seems really dubious.
Often modern medicine is based on these plants. And of course there are modern treatments that go way beyond what we were able to achieve with just plant-based medicine.
This isn't a choice between "cough medicine" and "slightly less effective cough medicine", it's a choice between a controlled and inspected product and random plants that may or may not be the right genus, dose and concentration.
If lack of finances is an issue, growing your own herb garden certainly isn't the solution. These plants aren't going to replace a $500 shot of insulin. At best you could maybe replace the occasional aspirin, dramamine, or buscopan, all of which are available over the counter at price points much lower than what it would cost to even buy a bag of quality seeds, never mind soil, fertilizer, and the garden to plant it all in. (Or the time and labor to plant and tend it).
Furthermore, this kind of tech requires expertise that is not easily decentralized. As such, it tends centralize power and control of one’s health in a civilization. The civilization needs to educate and produce a few to be able to serve the many, leaving aside the number of tech dependencies in order to produce facilities that produce this, let alone the research organizations to continue studying this stuff. It does not make for a resilient, anti-fragile civilization.
Much of our existing medicines come from scientific study of herbal medicines, and I do not think we have yet fully tapped that source of knowledge.
Additionally, I think there are many cases where an herbal medicine is a like 50% effective solution compared to modern medicine, but less than 10% the price. Many doctors may not even be aware of such treatments.
One non-herbal but older than modern medicine treatment I am aware of is soaking cuts, punctures, etc in very salty water to disinfect and help it close better. This is exceedingly cheap and helps ensure wounds never get infected.
An old herbal treatment for the lungs is inhaling the fumes of apple brandy from a charred oak keg. Ethanol is an antiseptic, while the apple and oak flavoring compounds help stimulate the lungs to repair themselves.
Since I've started huffing on apple brandy, the itch in my lungs is much better than it used to be.
The charred oak keg is important, because it facilitates the evaporation of the brandy into fumes. Someone shared that they use oak spirals in a glass container: https://www.facebook.com/EdgarCayceOnPsychicHealth/posts/pfb...
My mom's husband tested positive for the virus recently. She developed a cough, but 'tested negative' (home tests are probably mostly worthless). After a month she was still coughing. I set her up with a barrel and sent her husband to the liquor store for apple brandy. Her cough was mostly cleared up in a week. Then she got sick again, but this cleared up quicker than her September case of "not-coronavirus".
edit: treating lungs with inhaled alcohol is science-approved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756511
To be fair, according to a write up by a guy deep in the semantic web, there were several choices made that lead to the collapse of the first attempt.
In principle this is a great topic. I got some interest in the semantic web technologies in early 2000'.
My conclusions were that:
- The approach was extremely rigid, basically all info (data and metadata) had to be classified mostly in a hierarchical way (first order logic) with only a few exceptions when most real life cases were unable to fit in this scheme.
- Companies in Semantic Web just sold search. Classification was often done by hand or by "connectors" that had to be chosen or even tailored by hand.
A few years later search technologies were much more powerful and AI enabled impressive results in classification.
That said some projects like Cyc were impressive.
Plants and food can heal. They work different from the pills modern peoples are used to popping.
A single article listing a few plants and a laundry list of things each supposedly helps with is, at best, like a movie trailer teaser to try to get you excited. It doesn't even seem to direct you to more in-depth resources.
It's not literally true, but it expresses the idea that you are growing a wide variety of things that one would find at a vegatable market.