The New Scientist Health published a rather interesting article regarding a thousand-year-old, 9th century Anglo-Saxon ‘antibiotic’ remedy for curing an eye disease, the stye. The amazing aspect of the story, in my opinion, is that modern scientists are figuratively ‘gassed’ about the recipe’s ability to have killed off 90 percent of the MRSA infection in a controlled laboratory test with mice. What modern pharmaceuticals, medicine, science and other aspects of life and living fail to realize is that human ingenuity, and their cognitive abilities for working with Nature’s bounties, allowed humans to evolve over thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of years. Some rather ‘recent’ practices in Chinese, Hindu, and Hebrew healing histories survive to this very day. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with its potent natural herbs and other substances; the Vedic/Hindu [Indian] culture’s Ayurveda medicine based in diet and plants; and Ancient Hebrew Herbal Medicine—all—were part of humankind’s original pharmacopeia.
Humans did not evolve over millennia with today’s modern toxic pharmaceuticals, which are made mostly from petroleum-based products/chemicals, including genetically modified organisms. Human bodies really don’t know how to use toxic chemicals as effectively as herbs and other natural specimens that have been “time tested” in the human organism, along with life-enhancing enzymes and other synergistic properties. If plants weren’t effective, their medicinal uses would not have been passed down through time and generations.