Chimpanzees 'self-medicate' with healing plants | Hacker News Reader

Chimpanzees 'self-medicate' with healing plants

bbc.com

51 pointspeutetre29 comments

Seems similar to: Chimpanzees observed applying and giving medicine (169 points, 2 years ago, 69 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537674

And has some relation to the recent Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant (253 points, 2 months ago, 156 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40237855

Shout out to my mum Dr Cindy Engel author of Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well And What We Can Learn From Them

Plants generate tens of thousands of chemicals. I’d be interested in finding out if there are any other plants or plants in normal diet that have or don’t have “some anti-inflammatory or anti-bacterial” properties, possibly they all do

And some have pro-inflammatory properties.

There is a lot of research done on the topic. A fun exercise is to enter a random vegetable or spice into the search box at pubmed. It's amazing how often you'll find something like cinnamon or beets in trials for the treatment of some disease or another. Sometimes I feel like literally every plant we eat has medicinal properties. ("Okay, now do bananas... no way, bananas???")

On the first symptoms of a cold i drink a tea from dried ginger, curcuma and pepper. Curcumin has antiviral properties and Piperin increases its' absorption by a factor of 2000. If it gets worse i drink tea with willowbark, was used by the ancient greeks allready. The salycilates in there were the basis for developing Aspirin.

> If it gets worse i drink tea with willowbark, was used by the ancient greeks allready. The salycilates in there were the basis for developing Aspirin.

Honest question: why not just take aspirin and get a reliable known dose of medication instead of the random amount that you'd get with the tea?

The short answer that an herbalist will give you is to use the whole plant in order to benefit from non-active compounds that balance out the active compounds, perhaps providing benefits like reducing side effects or potentiating the active compound. Also sometimes there's a sensory quality of the herb that contributes to its effect, eg. digestive bitters. Sometimes the herb tastes good. And often they are nutritionally beneficial too (vitamins, minerals, etc).

Personally I have observed the benefits firsthand of herbs including blue vervain, California poppy, chamomile, gentian, kava kava, lemon balm, marshmallow, motherwort, Oregon grape root, pedicularis, skullcap, wild lettuce, all quite safe (though some you don't want to take regularly). My herbalist doesn't bother with willow themselves, they've tried it and it's just not as effective as acetaminophen or ibuprofen, so I haven't bothered to try willow. Apparently the concentration of aspirin compounds in willow is quite low, perhaps that's why: https://www.evolutionaryherbalism.com/2021/07/28/willow-bark...

Thanks. I find this entire area really interesting, but also difficult to navigate as a skeptic because it can be really difficult to separate out the valid scientifically grounded stuff from the woo that tends to permeate a lot of this stuff, and there's a lot of scientifically grounded knowledge in natural remedies that also have some big caveats that people overlook. I think about things like, e.g. licorice root tea that is natural and might be effective at what it's supposed to do, but also presents a lot of danger that proper pharmaceuticals wouldn't (or would document properly) and it makes me a bit averse to going toward whole plants first.

Still, I do appreciate the perspective. The disaster preparedness and survival enthusiast in me also tries to keep a running catalogue of natural remedies in my head just in case.

Yep it’s a small minority of herbs whose effectiveness is backed up by quality studies. Modern herbalists have “debunked” some traditional remedies. Some herbs have legitimate uses but are also fairly dangerous, like lobelia. There’s a whole continuum. Flower essences are popular among legitimate herbalists, but smell bogus to me. I suggest to try for yourself and come to your own conclusions. The areas where I have found the herbs decisively effective are improving my sleep quality, quieting anxiety, and soothing and improving my digestion.

Turmeric is a potent TNFa inhibitor in the intestines.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27025786/

Just be careful about adulterated turmeric with lead in it

You're absolutely right.

The majority of foods Budongo chimpanzees eat have anti-bacterial properties:

1. B. papyrifera [1]

2. Ficus sur [2]

3. Ficus mucuso [3]

4. Ficus exasperata [4]

The medicinal aspect of this article is not that interesting but the fact that the chimpanzees seek out these alternative sources of food when injured or sick is interesting. I would like to see further research into how they learn to seek out these plants and the results of consuming them.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2023.1255...

[2] https://www.ajol.info/index.php/imcp/article/view/242262

[3] https://www.ajol.info/index.php/njpr/article/view/221351

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271228215_Evaluatio...

Also: Self-medication in insects (2019) [1]

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31358187/

Nothing says "spring detox" like drinking herbal concoction containing unknown alkaloids in unknown dosing.

And mushrooms.

Why aren’t we regulating this?

Those chimps should try an Ayahuasca ceremony

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.

Humans have picked it up a long time ago; see traditional Chinese medicine.

More 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.

Taking direct medical advice from chimpanzees is indeed a bad idea. But we do learn a lot by studying animal behaviour.

They didn’t use ChimpGPT to write the papers and aren’t in a replication crisis yet so they’re really a few steps ahead!

Chimp tenure is much less intense.

> 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.

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