Traditional Healing Powers Go Online
from the getting-information-out-there dept
It isn't just the technology world where questionable patents are showing up every day. Some scientists are upset that big drug companies are patenting remedies that are based on traditional healing solutions from around the world. So, they've started to put together a large database of traditional healing information, that patent researchers can use in checking for "prior art". Of course, there are plenty of other potential uses for the database as well - including having the big drug companies scour it for ideas (though, they're then likely to be less patentable). However, any solution that gets more info out about the healing powers of various items is probably a good thing.
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Double Edged Sword
It has been standard practice for centuries for pharmaceutical companies to find the active ingredients in folk remedies, removing the harmful inactive ingredients. Often, pharmaceuticals have found ways to improve the naturally made active ingredient so they cause fewer toxic side effects.
There is a good deal of hokum out there about "natural" and "artificial" products. The nutra-sweet that people call "artificial" in fact originates from a South American jungle plant. Plants in their wild form contain lots of toxic chemicals. The crops we eat are artificial breeds of plants that contain fewer of the deadly toxins. Wild tomatoes and oranges would kill most humans; even the cultivated varieties still contain poisons in non-fruit parts of the plant.
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I should also say
Also, just because people practiced some form of medicine for thousands of years does not make them right. Tibetans believe that diseases are caused by worms living in the spine, so the application of red-hot irons will kill the worms.
Pharmaceuticals have long since moved on. In the 1980s and 90s, scientists used to sample fauna in Costa Rican rain forests to look for new compounds. Since then, the trend has been to find new chemicals among microbes closer to home. We have discovered amazingly exotic, highly specialized bacteria lurking in everyday environments. As bacteria have adopted to modern environments, so too might they hold cures for modern ills.
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