Nature’s Medicine Chest

There animals and plants both on land and in the seas that are a rich source of remedies, painkillers and health supplements. Killer venoms can ease pain and save life, snakes scorpions, frogs, jellyfish and ants, which are the stingers prisoners and paralyses of the animal world, produce a range of venoms and secretions powerful enough to kill or immobilize their prey. Many of these poisons, scientist have now discovered, that contains chemical compounds that can be used in medical treatments.

 

Pit viper venom is used in a number of drugs. The venom of Brazilian pit viper, which induces the constriction of blood vessels and increases blood pressure, has been used to develop a drug for treating people with high blood pressure.  Russell’s viper of India and Southeast Asia has venom used for a drug that controls bleeding in hemophiliacs, and vital ingredient of a drug for treating thrombosis comes from Malayan pit vipers. And from the venom of African’s which include the deadly 14 feet long black mamba, scientists have isolated proteins that can help in the treatment of brain diseases.

Natural substances that effectively block pain have been found in the skin secretions of frogs. The skin toxins from some of the brightly colored arrow poison frogs of Central America have been made into a painkiller to be more effective than morphine. Scientists have also investigating the toxins used by certain spiders to immobilize their prey for up to three weeks without impairing the victim’s vital function. These secretions may be useful for the production f new drugs that could sedate patients for long periods without ill effect, perhaps during lengthy operation.

If you look in history, you will find that in 1870’s Joseph and Thomas Bancroft of Brisbane Australia a father and son team of Doctors, heard of a narcotic brew made by Aborigines They decided to investigate the medicinal potential of  this brew, made from water stored in the bark of a small tree of the eastern Australian rain forest. Experiments with extracts from the tree, a Duboisia known locally as a corkwood, resulted in the production of a highly effective dilator for use in eye surgery. Other doctors used the brew to treat inflammations and fevers. Before long rate forest it was being exported to Europe.

But with the move towards synthetic medicines at the beginning of the 20^th century Duboisia and many other local remedies fell out of favors. The 2^nd world war when synthetic drugs were in exceedingly short supply, did Australian researchers begin to look once more to the rain forest as a source of natural medicines. Testing different plants at random, the researchers discovered almost 500 alkaloids potent poisons made by certain plants to protect themselves against animals that strip them of their leaves.

They found too, that there are more poisonous plants growing in tropical rain forests than in temperate forests. This is because tropical forests have a far greater number of animals competing for food so tropical plants need much better defenses against animals. Duboisia leaves were found to contain several alkaloids one of which hyoscine, is a highly effective treatment for motion sickness, shell shock and stomach disorders, as well as the side effects resulting from cancer therapy. This led to the cultivation of Duboisia once again becoming a commercial proposition. Now the hyoscine rich leaves of a hybrid of two Duboisia species are exported in powdered form to pharmaceutical companies in many parts of the world.

The Senses

All our knowledge has its origins in or perceptions, to the ancient Greeks sensitivity constituted the essential difference between plants and animals, and between animals and humans. It was not that anyone specific sense was better developed in human’s just one glance at the animal kingdom will give examples of more acute vision (birds of prey), hearing (dogs and bats) or smell (insects). Rather it was that between them they provided a range of information that the intelligent brain could sift through and use for the purposes of communicating, socializing, improvising and inventing.

Every moment of our waking lives, millions of sense signals from the eyes, nose, mouth, ears and skins are sent to the brain most of which are never perceived on a conscious level. All these signals are constantly being adjusted analyzed edited eliminated, even completed by the brain. It is for example hard to find the blind spot in the eye not because it is not there but because the brain fills in the missing part of the visual jigsaw. The world of perception is very different from and much more selective than the world of sensation.

Moreover, in adulthood, the senses have a strict hierarchy, ruled first by the eyes and then by the ears the distance senses of sight and hearing and only later by the skin, the mouth and the nose the proximity senses of touch, taste and small. You can see how this sensual hierarchy organizes itself simply by closing your eyes. What happens? Your subjective inner world becomes filled with sound you can pick up the rhythm of your own breathing and back ground noise, which you may not have been aware of before, seems amplified. You do not need absolute quiet to before, seems amplified. You do not need absolute quite to hear a pin drop when your eyes are shut. If you carry this experiment one stage further and place your hands over your ears, you will now find that sensation arrives predominantly from your sense of touch.

You will suddenly become aware of the comparative softness or hardness of the chair on which you are sitting, of the texture of the clothes you are wearing and of sensations arriving from different parts of your body, your neck, your back, and your shoulders even your scalp. These are not new sensations they are continually being communicated to the brain via the skin. The difference is that you have only just begun to perceive them.

Further, we are all much more receptive to the messages arriving from our senses than we, perhaps, realize although most of the time we make use of just a fraction of their full potential. Think of the virtuosity displayed by the piano tuner, who carries all the notes of the scale I his head and can detect and adjust the slightest variation in the pitch, or the discernment of the master of wine, who has educated his senses of smell and taste to such a point of refinement that he can identify not only the vintage of a certain wine, but the locality and even the vineyard that produced it.