FOLKLORE - FACT OR FICTION?

 

From folklore to pharmaceuticals


Jeanie 21/09/20

 

If folklore is the traditional customs, beliefs and stories of a community, passed down through generations by word of mouth, folk remedies are the traditional medical practices that have  developed and been passed down orally, over many generations. 

 

Folk medicine is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as "the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness”. 


The written record of the study of herbs dates back 5,000 years to the Sumerians who wrote of well-established medicinal uses for plants and an Egyptian papyrus, from c1552 BC, lists folk remedies and magical medical practices. That however is the written record and is taking us towards the history of medicine rather than to folk remedies.  Importantly, women's oral folk knowledge is known to have existed alongside the written record and 44 folk remedies mentioned by the Greek physician Dioscorides (author of De materia medica) are still listed in European pharmacopoeias today. 

 

Often passed down and learned from mothers, our confidence in the healing properties of ancient remedies remains. Almost every family has some home remedy, usually plant-derived and involving empirical evidence, that has been learned and passed down by older family members and, while we have great faith in modern medicines and the NHS, we continue to use these folk remedies in the first instance.


  • My friend’s sister is a GP.  She would never recommend her patients use echinacea to stave off a cold but she buys it herself (in a different town where she is unlikely to be recognised).
  • We all know that you will invariably find a dock leaf nearby that will counteract the sting of a nettle.  
  • Clove oil works for toothache.
  • Salt-water gargle helps a sore throat
  • Ginger eases nausea (especially during pregnancy).
  • Lavender and chamomile have long traditions as folk remedies to lower blood pressure and relieve anxiety.
  • Menthol and eucalyptus oils help respiratory conditions.
  • Ice works for nearly anything else. Or honey.

Folk medicine exists side by side with modern medicine and there is conflict. If folk remedies fail then we seek biomedical treatment from modern medical experts. Folk remedies sometimes contradict what is scientifically known about the causes of illness and disease and can be contrary to proven effective medical treatments.  There are dangerous Covid19 folk remedies emerging already.

However ancient and modern folk remedies frequently share the same indications as their modern pharmaceutical relatives and the properties of folk remedies are an inspiration and catalyst for modern medicine. 

  • Celtic Druids considered meadowsweet a sacred herb and used it to reduce fever and swelling. Eventually salicylic acid was isolated in meadowsweet and in white willow bark and became the basis of aspirin. 
  • Native Americans used Pacific Yew as an anti-inflammatory. Paclitaxel was isolated and, in the 1990s, the drug was approved to treat ovarian cancer.  It is now widely used in the treatment of advanced breast cancer, AIDS related sarcoma and other cancers.
  • Since antiquity poppy seeds and leaves have been used as a pain killer, an aid to sleep and a sedative.  The poppy contains the alkaloid morphine which is still the best post-surgical pain relief and the basis of all opioid drugs.

These examples should remind us that folk remedies from around the world, as mythical and unscientific as they might seem today, may become the fact, rather than the fiction of future generations of medicines.


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