The Histories of Traditional Medicines

Many medicines, many histories

There are at least as many histories of medicine as there are medicines, and there are many more that we may never know.

Whatever medicine looks like on the surface today is rooted in very ancient history. Nearly every medicine is the result of millennia of observation, experimentation, conflict, debate, politics, resources and the engagement, merging and castration of worldviews.

Although each generation of medical practitioners is quick to claim that their's is the most advanced and effective for an entire host of plausible reasons, there are very few practitioners in any generation who can hold a clear vision and perspective of what medicines and practices have come before and what may come after them.

To this end, we begin our thrilling and sobering adventure…

The Many Histories of Traditional Medicines

Medicine can really only do one thing…

Historical Perspective of Traditional Indigenous Medical Practices: The Current Renaissance and Conservation of Herbal Resources

Which is a synopsis and general overview of the history and current status of Chinese, Indian, and Arabic herbal medicines as they are practiced today. 

This article describes among other things how diseases often originate and attack multiple targets rather than a single target. Traditional medicine systems often utilize multidrug therapy or polypharmacy: therapeutic interventions that use combinations of traditional medicinal components compounded into formulas. These formulas create multitarget interactions in treating diseases, and their therapeutic effects go far beyond what happens when we try to use each drug alone.

Traditional herbal formulas have evolved from thousands of years of direct experience and real-world observation, the complexities of which can not be reproduced in laboratory settings. Traditional formulas are prescribed using their own diagnostic systems that differ from those of biomedicine.

Modern medicine has its own understanding of disease and drug mechanisms based on laboratory and eventual field testing, but this method has only existed for a few scant decades, and its methodologies have become so distorted and polluted by economic and political factors that their results have become untrustable…