Medieval England medicine to the rescue

[OldAirmail]

A recipe from Bald's Leechbook for an eye salve may fight against super bug infections.

A one thousand year old Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections which originates from a manuscript in the British Library has been found to kill the modern-day superbug MRSA in an unusual research collaboration at The University of Nottingham.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo4K51bQVs0[/youtube]

[PhantomTweak]

Pretty amazing all the "natural" remedies are out there and are/were/have been well known to indiginous populations for a long, long time. Nature will provide, as the saying goes.
It's such a pity, to my thinking, that "Western Medicine" (white man's breakthroughs over the past 100 years or so ONLY!) totally and completely disregards anything that doesn't involve the dreaded "Big Pharma" drugs, priced at 2000% of what they should be, and making certain they all have such marvellously bad side effects, requiring other medicines...etc etc ad-nauseam. Anything not part of all that must be totally ignored, and poo-poohed by Western Medicine as mere witch-doctory, shamanism, pure and utter non-sense, and complete superstition.
Yet, thankfully, on extremely rare and far-between occasions, someone in that system steps WAY out of line, and actually tests such flummery, and LO! it actually does what was claimed for it. Son-uv-a-gun!!! Naturally (no pun intended) such things must be tested for a few dozen years, double-blinded studies involving a few hundred thousand volunteers from all walks of society, ages, and so on before it can be released to the public...at 2000% of what it really costs...

See a pattern here? And yet, they totally ignore things like Chinese medicine, a knowledge base 5000 years in the making as primitive, compared to Western, Modern medicine, now almost 200 whole years old! Seems a small dicrepancy being ignored here...

Pat☺

[Fozzer]

Onions, Leeks, and Garlic are my daily dose of medicine with most of my meals every day....

...keeps my tummy in good order!... ...!

Paul...Mr Onion-head.....with fresh fruit and lots of fresh veg!.... ....!

[PhantomTweak]

Onions I love (much to my lovely wife's annoyance), mushrooms (fried with some butter & wine!), and potatos. Fried, mashed, french fried, au-gratin, you name it. And of course CORN. On the cob, naturally! Sadly, that's about all the veggies I'll eat, with an occaisional apple thrown in for good measure.
Let's not forget STEAK!! I LOVE A GOOD STEAK!!! Yummmm...

Ok, I'm hungry now. Off to eat!

Pat☺

[Fozzer]

Some of my daily dose of Vegetables include; Potatoes, Carrots, Parsnips, Onions, Leeks, sliced, mixed Peppers, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Spinach, Peas,.......just about everything green and coloured, apart from grass!.... ...!

6 to 8 different portions each day...

...all good stuff!

Paul.....Battered Cod Fish 'n Chips for tonight's Supper...with a small? glass of Mulled Wine... ....!

[OldAirmail]

I find it fascinating that some cures have been found by looking into the past.

And a fair number of them can still be used today.

Just check out the history of scurvy treatment.


But treatments from the past don't always work out for the good.

Practically from the "discovery" of Syphilis, mercury has been one of the prime treatments for the disease.

Syphilis – Its early history and Treatment until Penicillin and the Debate on its Origins

In 1495 an epidemic of a new and terrible disease broke out among the soldiers of Charles VIII of France when he invaded Naples in the first of the Italian Wars, and its subsequent impact on the peoples of Europe was devastating – this was syphilis, or grande verole, the “great pox”.

The remedies were few and hardly efficacious, the mercury inunctions and suffumigations that people endured were painful and many patients died of mercury poisoning

Syphilis, 1494–1923

Effective treatment for syphilis was controversial because of the perception that a widely available cure would increase “immoral” behavior.

“Syphilization”

In the mid–19th century, European physicians conducted experiments in “syphilization”, often on hospitalized prostitutes. “Syphilization” was the name given to repeated inoculations with syphilis matter in order to “saturate” the subject, on the theory that the larger the number of visible, or “primary,” lesions, the less likely it was that secondary syphilis would develop.

“Syphilization” was also used as a preventative, analogous to smallpox inoculation.

Imagine! Using live syphilis on uninfected people to prevent syphilis!

The Good Old Days - THEY WERE TERRIBLE!

[PhantomTweak]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that all remedies from history were perfect, or even effective. What I was going on about (as Paul might phrase it) was that Western Medicine, as a whole tends to disregard anything not discovered in the past couple hundred years as superstition ad flummery. Aspirin, for example, used to made as Willow Bark tea, but Western Medicine disregarded it until some one put it in pill form. Same for Poppy Extract, or Opium, which is now Morphine. The list goes on and on, but the main problems I have are 1) The cost of such pills now, and 2) The overall disregard of the medical community for pain management of chronic pain.
Take a glance at price lists sometime. Just about ANY pain med (Morphine for example) is going to be 5-10 times more than something like, say Nitroglycerine (tablets, NOT liquid! ). They have no problem postponing a life, regardless of how miserable and pain-wracked that person may be.

Anyway, you are 100% right, a lot of the experimentation in the last few hundred years has been either worthless (alligator poop as a contraceptive for example, that the ancient Egyptians used), or downright detrimental or even deleterious to life, as your mercury treatment for Syphilis was.
Fair weather and good health to all!
Pat☺