It's interesting for sure, but the mystery is how he gained that knowledge. Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do or his ancestors?
Aren’t we faced with the same fundamental mystery of human insight? Where does it come from?
Trial and error?
Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
41–50 of 165 posts
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about what people or scientists say. It's the wrong frame to think about it in. Pharmaceuticals these days run as businesses, and its not financially beneficial for them to even quantify the medicinal qualities of chemically unprocessed plants. Because you can't build a competitive advantage around something like that. So, while they often take inspiration taken from plant based compounds, usually the essent…
I'm pretty sure that the NIH does do studies into efficacy of plants. This was after a ten second Kagi search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059459/ . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847409/ I don't know if that counts as "publicly funded medicine", but it's certainly a publicly funded group that studies medicine.
USA's FDA is notorious for not finding therapeutical effect in plant medicines. The same plants which have been in use for 100s years in ex-USSR and Germany. USSR's pharma was relatively prudent and would not peddle non-working solutions for New Age reasons.
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#43Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trial and error?
Bingo. We only know which mushrooms that are tasty or give us a fun time because a lot of people died finding out.
There's also cheating : isn't coffee bean edibility observed from goats? essentially outsourced trial and error is a thing too.
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. We only know which mushrooms that are tasty or give us a fun time because a lot of people died finding out.
There's also cheating : isn't coffee bean edibility observed from goats? essentially outsourced trial and error is a thing too.
Which is exactly what we do with lab mice.
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#46Obviously orangutans are much smarter as a species, they are know to pass down knowledge/behaviors, including tool usage, down generations. But there could be more to this behavior. A dog instinctively knows to eat grass when they have stomach issues and Alaskan Bears eat certain plants to expel parasites after hibernation. How do they know? Zoopharmacognosy is a fascinating subject that needs more research. https://…
When my wife was pregnant the doc said to let them know if she had any cravings for minerals, clay, or something weird like that. Turns out it can mean a vitamin deficiency. Not sure how the mind knows to send out a specific craving besides food and water.
There's a school of thought that says a lot of thinking happens in the gut, which delegates tasks to the brain, so to speak.
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#47[flagged]
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#48It would be nice if they could work out what this "medicinal" tree is and start mass-producing this paste because that looks like some serious healing going on there! ... or perhaps orangutans are just way better at this sort of thing that human are? I recently tripped up running and had a much smaller cut (compared to the apparent missing-chunk-of-flesh this orangutan had) on my knee that took several weeks to fully…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibraurea_tinctoria
There are all sorts of beneficial chemicals in nature, way more than we've accurately assessed and documented. Because plants can't be patented, they're left largely unknown - the incentives that might bring access to things like this are almost entirely missing from the modern Western market.
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure that the NIH does do studies into efficacy of plants. This was after a ten second Kagi search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059459/ . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847409/ I don't know if that counts as "publicly funded medicine", but it's certainly a publicly funded group that studies medicine.
USA's FDA is notorious for not finding therapeutical effect in plant medicines. The same plants which have been in use for 100s years in ex-USSR and Germany. USSR's pharma was relatively prudent and would not peddle non-working solutions for New Age reasons.
The articles I posted were for the NIH, not the FDA. They are two separate organizations, with admittedly some overlap, but still distinct.
The NIH researches lots of potential health claims and will publish their data as well. The stuff I linked was two examples that I found in like ten seconds, but there’s tons more. The NIH is much more of a research organization than regulatory, unlike the FDA.
I just felt it prudent because the person I was responding to was lamenting about not having a publicly funded research body to investigate potential health benefits for plants that is simply untrue in the US.
Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
#50It's interesting for sure, but the mystery is how he gained that knowledge. Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do or his ancestors?
More than likely the plant has a noticeable topical anesthetic effect - Orangutans don't have an explicit mechanism for passing abstract knowledge so the phenomena has to be explained subjectively. It might be a particular cooling effect, or something recognizable about the plant that it contrasted against an injury for which it didn't use the plant. Or it observed another ape that did have such a subjective effect and comparison - the Einstein of orangutans might have figured it out generations ago and they've been imitating a successful behavior since then.
The plant has been studied and analyzed, with various papers out there, like this one, but there doesn't seem to be anything recognized as effective for people (yet, more studies are probably needed) :
https://www.phcogj.com/sites/default/files/PharmacognJ-13-1-...
In previous studies, it was found that the Akar Kuning (Arcangelisia flava Merr) contains chemical compounds, including saponins, flavonoids and tannins, besides that the roots also contain glycosides and alkaloids, especially the isokuinolin group, namely berberine, jatrorizin, and palmatin. There are also some minor alkaloids such as columbamine dehidrokoridalmin, homoaromolin and talifendin, and fibraleucin terpenes, and fibraurin has several activities such as antifungal, antiasma, antibacterial, anti-tumor, anti-malarial and anti- inflammatory.