Self-medication by orangutans using bioactive properties of a plant | Hacker News Reader

Self-medication by orangutans using bioactive properties of a plant

nature.com

119 pointspanabee47 comments

If you observe animals long enough you'll notice they have that knowledge of plant properties, and will seek out specific plants in order to self regulate.

I have watched my dog and cat seek out tansy (tanacetum vulgare) and rub themselves on it. Tansy is known to repel ticks and intestinal worms. The two of them regularly eat grass, dandelion and mint leaves.

It's hilarious to say that an orangutan is "self-medicating." You mean it wasn't prescribed by another orangutan with a medical degree?

I think they may have meant it wasn't prescribed by a veterinarian with a medical degree.

Somewhat related:

Why Do Parrots (And People) Eat Clay?

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/07/547981850/wh...

Here is a similar story from a couple years ago of lemures using chemicals from crushed millipedes to treat infections: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/lemurs-mi...

Ironically, other species of Dracaena are among the most cultivated indoor plants. Everybody and its dog have one at home.

I wonder if those Dracaena could have a similar effect. They have cutting finely toothed leaves so chew it or put it in the mouth does not seem a wise move in any case, (And to confound it by a Dieffenbachia would be a lethal mistake), but for external use... may work. Would be a really easy way for researchers to prove if orangutans feel any pain relief.

Its interesting that there is a naturally occurring TNF blocker, when big pharma's TNF blockers (Humira, Remicade, etc) cost tens of thousands of dollars.

If we see them tending plants its s virtuous circle

This is shown in the Wild Kratts episode "A Huge Orange Problem", first broadcast in 2012.

Is there a sharp line between drug and food?

You are what you eat. I'd say no.

I'm not versed in this at all, but wouldn't one call "food" what sustains us in our current state and a "drug" what alters some aspect of us? (Paracetamol suppressing pain and fever, for example.)

You might describe an (ideal) food as something the cellular agents in our bodies take in to use as passive raw material for their own homeostatic processes. Most foods are not ideal in this way, though. But this still seems to be the ideal, as those things within foods that act on the body are almost always considered unwanted impurities in the food, not a desired “foodlike aspect” of the food.

You might equally look at the other end of the spectrum, and describe an ideal... something as a substance that actively comes in and affects the body, without the body’s active help.

The closest word for that “something” in English is “toxin.” But this is both imprecise (some toxins only act with the body’s assistance); and overspecific — “toxin” implies negative effect, but this “something” could be a positive thing (a chelating agent, for example.)

“Drugs” don’t really hew closer to one side or the other of the “food” / “toxin” spectrum. Many of them are just chemicals your body should be making anyway but isn’t. Many do act directly on the body. And many interact with the body through mechanisms the body has in place specifically to allow exogenous chemicals to do that.

Probably wherever you arbitrarily draw the line of substantial or minimal effect.

If you plotted the "effects" of every single consumeable thing on a graph. There would prob be a noticeable trough in the middle, and that would be your threshold for food vs drug.

But for example, adding a lot of little things together can make a big change on your body composition and mindset...

It's probably a good idea to distinguish between drugs and food.

One way to think about it is that drugs are meant to have medical and therapeutic effects, while food act as fuel and nutrition.

The nutrition aspect of food seems to overlap with medicine; something that is normally 'just food' might become a medication if somebody were malnourished. For instance, regular foods containing vitamin C could be considered 'medicine' to somebody with scurvy.

Interesting. I wonder if orangutans would use pain relief medication as well, one which has no anti-inflammatory effects (e. g. Paracetamol). This would imply a subjective experience of pain.

Orangutans should be happy they are not capable of creating a pharmaceutical industry. Imagine good chunk of population of orangutans in prison for using a plant. It's what humans did with cannabis.

This is the epitome of the "How does the collective well-being of society affect you in any way? Mind your own business!" take.

Troubled people use drugs, including cannabis. Troubled people are prone to crime. Crime spreads and creates unsustainable living conditions for everyone. And that's not mentioning the destructive effect on culture and social interaction in general.

"Live and let live" wasn't a viable outlook on life for thousands of years, and it won't be going forward. Libertarian fantasies were a brief anomaly in history.

This is false. Drug use rates are comparable among the upper and lower class, but we overwhelmingly enforce against the poor.

Also, you should try some ganja, it might calm you down.

And this is the flawed "it happens more to the poor, so it should be abolished" take.

Something being done disproportionately doesn't mean it's wrong. It's a way of diverting away from the core point by appealing to victimhood.

Though at the end of the day this all comes down to a fundamental disagreement between people who embrace human intuition and pattern recognition versus those who think those things are somehow uncivilized or evil -- a delusion orangutans, I'm certain, don't share.

This is the epitome of a straw man argument.

The original commenter was suggesting that incarceration for consuming cannabis is irrational, not that citizens shouldn't be responsible at some level for the collective good of their society.

Additionally, the implied causal chain you've laid out is fallacious. Ignoring the vagueness of what "troubled" means exactly here, if it is "troubled-ness" that makes someone prone to both crime and cannabis use, then clearly it is the troubled-ness, not the cannabis use, that causes the criminality. And if the goal is to reduce criminality, as is implied in your post, then whatever causes people to become troubled must be addressed—which, again, isn't cannabis, as it seems being troubled is a prerequisite to using it.

This is akin to the classic example of banning ice cream to reduce the murder rate. Ice cream sales and murder rates increase in a correlated manner—but only because both increase in the summer.

Also, as a final point, the fact that drugs like cannabis are criminalized turns any connection between cannabis and crime into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The real societal cost to the criminalization of cannabis comes via the violence and destruction associated with any criminal marketplace. The last time we saw massive organized violence between criminal organizations over alcohol, for instance, was the last time it was criminalized—i.e. during prohibition.

But yeah, something something libertarians something something cultural decay.

No one will ever be convinced by such autistic data crunching.

Human intuition is responsible for things like criminalizing drugs.

People feel uncomfortable around drug-addled lechers, so they want them imprisoned.

That's all the justification needed.

Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. Particularly please don't post name-calling or personal attacks. We ban such accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There is no name-calling or personal attacking in that comment. The one qualifier that could possibly be interpreted as "an attack" is referring to an inanimate subject (data crunching) not to any given participant in the conversation. Learn to read.

Using 'autistic' like that is both name-calling and a personal attack.

Please do not post ideological flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Troubled people use drugs, including cannabis. Troubled people are prone to crime. Crime spreads and creates unsustainable living conditions for everyone. And that's not mentioning the destructive effect on culture and social interaction in general.

This description seems to me to be clearly one of correlation, not of causation. The (from my point of view) simplistic argument is, that the drug use causes either crime or troubled people.

The question here is, has the criminalisation of drug use or abuse has had any tangible positive effect on either drug use/abuse or crime?

To my knowledge treating addiction rather as a medical issue than a criminal one seemed to have shown quite positive results in Portugal, and seems to me a more reasonable approach.

Cannabis prison is for pacifist freedom-loving hippies.

Opioid addiction¹ is made by pharma industry.

¹ the scale of the social problem

1.6% of the state prison population is in for cannabis, and 2.2% of the federal prison population.

Hardly what I would call a “good chunk”

You can't say "state prison population" and not specify which state, unless I'm misunderstanding?

I think it means population of all the state prisons combined.

Factoring in that the prison population is a "good chunk" of the total population should elevate the scale of this discussion above statistical haggling

Total incarcerated population is about 2.3M

State Level: 1.3M * 1.6% = 20,800 Federal: 225k * 2.2% = 4,950

So about 25k people out of a country of 330M (0.007%)

And most of these are for trafficking, not just possession.

I still think it's too many people, but it's not a "good chunk." The amount of people that actually go to jail for mere possession is tiny, and that number is going down.

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents–especially not generic flamewar tangents. They make discussion more predictable and therefore less interesting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"rubbing a foamy mixture of saliva and leaf onto specific parts of the body. Interestingly, the local indigenous human population also use a poultice of these leaves for the relief of body pains."

Or:

"Herbal medicine doesn't work"...

I bet you all $25,000 of my own money and two decades of my life that it does work.

How do you think we got where we are?

I'll condede though, herbs will never be as powerful as pharmacologically extracted and concentrate and modified / enhanced molecules.

Both have their place.

Herbs can kill you. Powerful enough, isn't it?

Good herbal medicine does work. (“Turmeric in tea to reduce inflammation”)

Bad herbal medicine doesn’t work. (“Sage smoke for spiritual cleansing”)

Pharmaceuticals work so much better in most cases.

This all gets (incorrectly) summarised to: “Herbal medicine doesn’t work.”

Tumeric seems unlikely to work.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/cu...

Sage smoke allegedly kills airborne bacteria, fwiw

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17913417/

Herbal medicine that works tends to be called 'medicine' once it has been corroborated and the active ingredient(s) have been isolated.

Unfortunately, this tends to mean that what you are left with - the herbal remedies with dubious efficacy - get left with the herbal remedy tag.

This generally only happens when money can be made on it.

Opium seems to be a good example of this, as it is of course used to make a large number of pharmaceuticals.

“Herbal medicine sometimes does more harm than good, sometimes only works by the placebo effect, sometimes only relieves symptoms and masks the underlying disease, sometimes has been turned into effective medicine, sometimes has better modern alternatives, sometimes is just entirely useless and rarely just works.” ... is too long to write out.

Digging up roots with a wooden stick works as well, and got us going for thousands of years. It's just that technology makes everything more efficient.

Numerous modern medicine is derived from plants or traditional herbal medicine. Aspirin is the most famous example, it's the active ingredient of willow-based remedies.

It's still a bad idea to drink willow-bark tea in lieu of taking an aspirin nowadays.

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