Clutching at straws....

[Workingman]

..... or a new approach?

The WHO has approved phase 3 trials for some African herbal remedies for Covid. They are turning to science to see whether there are safe and effective traditional therapies to be adopted, it said.

It all sounds a bit "out there" and witch doctorish to those of us in the West, but herbal / plant based (modern) drugs have been with us for many years, some of them are based on thousands of year old remedies. Think along the lines of aspirin, quinine, morphine, penicillin and LSD and you can begin to understand the thinking behind the trials.

Many of them might / will not work, but that is also the case with some of the 140+ Western lab based vaccines we are testing.

[cromwell]

It can't hurt to try.

[cruiser2]

My father taught me to rub a dock leaf on the skin if I was ever stung by nettles.
It is an otl cure which works.

[saundra]

That's an old remedy cruiser
Some times modern medicine is to modern for our immune system I personally think but many lives are saved through it
I think there is a lot to be said for homeopathy well Prince Charles would agree with me
Stay safe xx

[Suff]

Hmmm, people died for millennia before modern medicine. Even with medicine people died before Antibiotics of things we simply ignore today.

Modern Vaccines are created in a way that our forefathers would have deemed to be magic (good or bad, probably bad because they couldn't understand it).

However. All of that being said, there are remedies out there in the world that work. Humans have been curing illnesses for thousands of years through trial and error. Sometimes it works.

So it can't hurt, so long as it does not take away from genetically engineered 21st century silver bullets designed to block the progress of the pandemic and burn it out.

[Workingman]

It was additional research not a replacement, so that is good.

And Africa, with its 1.3bn people, has remarkably few cases and deaths, about 1.4 million cases, and 34,000 deaths since March is in a good place re Covid. Even if the cases and deaths are not as rigorously checked as they are in the rest of the world they would have to go up five to ten fold to catch up, and that is not likely to be the case.

Some other non-pharma 'cures' that work and are now used in medical situations are leeches, honey, molasses and, as many ex forces will know, urine.