1000 year old MRSA cure..... ox bile garlic, copper, and wine

https://www.yahoo.com/health/1-000-year-old-medical-remedy-shows-promise-115121260667.html

And I suspect the side-effects are far less damaging than anything the big pharma-corps are peddling. "May cause death, seizures, incontinence, impotence, headaches, nausea, spontaneous combustion, etc. Talk to your doctor to see if Dumbozor is right for you."

that is a very cool find. Wonder what else is in that book?

mad_machine wrote: that is a very cool find. Wonder what else is in that book?

For every 1000th blood letting and ox musk potion they find one of these so it's worth testing this stuff out. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the only thing in there of value though. We are talking about people who thought bathing regularly was unhealthy.

I've got a like 5K year old (dot) Indian medical text book translated to English and some 100+ year old American medical text books. It is amazing how little things change. The India book has stuff like: If the patient is like this, has this and this, walk away, their dead. If they are like this, this and this, give them this, they'll be OK. Bone sticking out of the skin? Put some Ghee on it. (Ghee is clarified butter.) Of course, the plastic surgery techniques in it are used today.

I dislike the way this is presented. The original recipe was for an eye salve not an antibacterial.

The yahoo text above makes it sound like "Ancient goo better than new goo at same thing" but really this like discovering that the stuff that turned ancient people's clothes white in the river can also be used to make a compound that is good at killing bacteria or that a roman sword used to give many a Germainian a fatal wound could also hammer tent spikes with it's pommel.

Here is a bit better presentation.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27263-anglo-saxon-remedy-kills-hospital-superbug-mrsa.html#.VRoyCyMo4wg

Still cool... just not so much fodder for the types of people who don't know the answer to "What do you call alternative medicine that is proven to work?" is "We call it medicine".

EDIT: oops, forgot link. Fixed.

Meh, there is a ton of stuff that would surprise you that has medical applications. When I lived in Texas, I had this old lady that was a patient of mine, Cajun Voodoo Woman is how I thought of her. Brown recluse bite is pretty nasty, which is what I treated her for the first time I saw her. Had a very ugly necrotic area, left a hole that two nickels stacked on top of each other would just about fill up after I cleaned it up. Healed incredibly quickly, on her first follow up I commented on how well she must be following instructions, and she laughed out loud. She only came to me because she could not do it herself because it was on the outside of her foot, too awkward to work on herself. She made a paste out of honey and iodine, and used that. She told me about using honey and iodine on nasty, infected wounds about 5 years before a nice sales rep came in with this new product. He describes it, pulls out a tube of it so I can check it out. It looks like honey and iodine, which is pretty much what it turns out to be. $50 for a 2 ounce tube. I told him that for that much dough, you can buy enough honey and iodine to last you forever.

Copper and Silver are both pretty antibacterial

As are some of the extracts in garlic oil and some wines, depending on fermentation. The part I found interesting was that they test the combined recipe as well as the individual parts and found the mix was better than the sum of the parts - a true synthesis effect.

The part I found really laughable was that the article I read (don't remember where) was all fired up about the fact this discovery indicated that they were practicing Scientific Method in the dark ages! They hypothesized! They experimented! They tested conclusions! Amazing!

(So, trying something and failing, then thinking "Well, E36 M3. Better write that down and try something else..." is revolutionary scientific method. Which is really all scientific method has ever been, but Lord help the media when you put the word "Scientific" in front of anything.)

kanaric wrote:

mad_machine wrote: that is a very cool find. Wonder what else is in that book?

For every 1000th blood letting and ox musk potion they find one of these so it's worth testing this stuff out. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the only thing in there of value though. We are talking about people who thought bathing regularly was unhealthy.

Actually there are some health disadvantages to regular bathing, although obviously there are smell and hygiene advantages...but again, we're cherry-picking golden nuggets of (possibly accidental) wisdom out of a large, ancient crypt of bullE36 M3.