[LMB] AKICIF: herbology OT:

[CatMtn at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/10/2006 3:00:01 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
trix at queerscience.net writes:

As Marna  says, please don't take Culpeper as gospel! One of the reasons
they  invented homeopathy (no snarkage please, I'm a qualified homeopath)
was  that for the first time, homeopaths *took the substance* they  were
"proving" as a medicine in a systematic way to enumerate all its  effects.
Modern pharamacology has a historical debt to the development of  that
method.



M:
 
Hardly!  But I did learn in pharmacology that many of the old  remedies 
really did work, although controlling the dosage was a problem.   And when we're 
talking about things like digitalis, the medicine could kill the  patient if the 
dosage was too strong, so often they were given too little to  have much 
effect.  It's a fascinating subject, though.  Frex, one of  the old remedies that 
seems unlikely is colchicine for gout--it takes  effect slowly, as I recall, 
so it's puzzling how they knew to keep taking  it until it worked.  Still, it 
was an accepted and effective treatment, so  somebody must have done it.
 
Mary