Skipjack wrote:We know of many ancient books that have been lost.
Yeah and that is a pitty from a historical POV. It could tell an archeologist or historian a lot. I doubt however that there would be any medical discovery in it, that would be proof to be superior, even equal to our current medical methods.
The problem with that uninformed attitude is that a large portion of the newest medicines are compounds derived from various herbal and natural remedies. As an example, scientists have recently found the major component of green tea is a compound which binds with a key protein that is responsible for the immortality of cancer cells.
When my father had surgery to remove a large and small cell esophagal cancerous tumor a few years ago, he went into a regimen of drinking a pint of green tea three times a day at his doctors recommendation. His doctors credit this regimen for what they regard as a full recovery.
There are currently drugs in trials that use the compounds in green tea to target cancers more effectively and with fewer side effects than chemotherapy.
And yet they do, so your assumption must be wrong.
Why? Some tribes (not them, I know) practice female circumcision and think that it has some medical advantage too. Yet, there is none. It is simply a barbaric ritual with no medical meaning at all.
And our civilized western tribe still sees plenty of male circumcision without any peer reviewed research justifying it, so what? We also engage in a lot of plastic surgery which has no medical justification, surgery which is extremely painful (liposuction, breast augmentation, etc), at least as painful as female circumcision. Women here undergo this pain due to cultural pressure, sometimes even pressure from spouses. It is incredibly bigoted for you to judge our plastic surgery acceptable while saying female circumcision you claim is barbaric.
Also I want to point out other medical errors such tribes may have. Canibalism was already mentioned. Primeval tribes would sometimes drill holes into someones head to let out the evil spirits (it is believed that the poor guy simply had headaches).
They applied tattoos to their bodies believing they would help.
It is all wrong, total bull and in no way helpful. If anything this stuff is dangerous.
Medical doctors drill holes in peoples heads to relieve fluid pressure. Tatooing triggers dopamine responses which does also provide pain relief.
I myself discovered a cure for headaches that involves torturing myself by violently pinching the piece of skin between my nostrils hard for 30 seconds. This triggers a dopamine response that cures the headache within 5 minutes without any medication. An ignorant medical doctor of the 1950's would claim I am mentally deranged and prone to inflicting pain on myself in response to hallucination.
There are a lot of things discovered by trial and error in traditional medicine along with a lot of superstitious hooey. I suspect a lot of traditional treatments that don't work today may have worked at some time in the past but became ineffective as disease organisms evolved defenses against them.