To all the people born in the 90s

[Krystina Ferraris]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

My mother has been using the kinesiology for half a century and though I always considered it some sort of voodoo, I have not been able to argue her results. What you are pointing out is a pathway for how that potentially works and it is not voodoo after all.

You are very welcome Arielle, I am happy you found that useful!

Animal self-selection is a fascinating field, I came across it years ago as an undergrad while studying primates. There is a huge body of work on animal self-medication, super interesting if you like a few long reads! See this for example:  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1419966111

Kinesiology and bio-feedback is currently being applied to animals over here, as integrative therapy, I actually have a friend who practises it on large and small animals. Horses in particular seem to respond really well to kinesiology, we use it regularly with the horses in our care. Not voodoo!

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 hours ago, Krystina Ferraris said:

You are very welcome Arielle, I am happy you found that useful!

Animal self-selection is a fascinating field, I came across it years ago as an undergrad while studying primates. There is a huge body of work on animal self-medication, super interesting if you like a few long reads! See this for example:  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1419966111

Kinesiology and bio-feedback is currently being applied to animals over here, as integrative therapy, I actually have a friend who practises it on large and small animals. Horses in particular seem to respond really well to kinesiology, we use it regularly with the horses in our care. Not voodoo!

There's a reason domestic dogs and cats eat certain grasses from time to time only to regurgitate it. They don't always get it right, likely due to their domestication. Definitely a link there.

[Madelaine McMasters]

8 hours ago, Krystina Ferraris said:

I am pretty sure humans had this ability as well as primates do, but as we lost the need to innately recognise what can help and what can kill us by sniffing, we also lost this innate skill and instead relied on telling each other that “ol’Joe died when he ate that stuff” 😅 (I’m kidding here sort of) 😀

When I was a kid, our dog would eat grass and throw up. Dad explained that something was upsetting Rocket's tummy, and he knew how to get rid of it. I asked how he "knew". He explained that dogs probably didn't "know," evolution did. Dogs just did random stuff, as they do, and those that did useful random stuff produced more and better puppies because they lived longer and healthier lives. If dogs were smarter, they wouldn't eat the stuff that upset their tummies in the first place, like my dirty underwear. He doubted there was much thinking involved, but rather that over millions of years, sensory mechanisms had evolved to make eating grass for a tummy ache a "no brainer". Grass smells yummy on an upset tummy? The recent introduction of dirty underwear hasn't given evolution enough time to "teach" dogs not to chow down on it.

Zoopharmacognosy is, of course, a lot more complex and interesting than that. Dad went on to tell me about pregnant elephants who sometimes ate the bark off of some tree to induce labor. African women, presumably having observed this behavior, made tea from that bark to do the same thing. He'd learned this sometime prior to WWII, while sailing around the South Pacific in a submarine. Imagine my amusement, decades later, (1990-ish) when I read of research by Dr.  Holly Dublin, revealing that pregnant elephants sometimes eat the bark off red syringa trees to induce labor. Who knew?!

https://asknature.org/strategy/eating-bark-to-induce-labor/

Somewhere along the way, human evolution traded away some lower level "sensory intelligence" for higher level thinking. As a result, we have to write down a lot of stuff other animals "know", and we seem to misplace the notes. Every few years I read an article expressing astonishment over the "discovery" that elephants and African women induce labor with herbs. They've been doing so forever and we knew it, but popular science can't seem to remember that. Keep better notes, people!

Unfortunately, old ways die hard, and the under-educated use of herbal remedies is on the rise...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291424/

Edited July 14, 2022 by Madelaine McMasters
Measure twice, cut once. Read once, write twice.

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Unfortunately, old ways die hard, and the under-educated use of herbal remedies is on the rise...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291424/

Hopefully, the elephant dung was only used in homeopathic doses.  Reminds me of vibhuti, which some people swear by as a food / medicine / condiment (and contains the ash of burned cow dung).  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibhuti

Edited July 14, 2022 by Love Zhaoying

[Madelaine McMasters]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Hopefully, the elephant dung was only used in homeopathic doses.  Reminds me of vibhuti, which some people swear by (and contains the ash of burned cow dung).  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibhuti

One of the most powerful folk medicines is storytelling, the placebo effect on steroids. This doesn't work in wild animals, but there's some evidence it rubs off on domestic pets.

[Krystina Ferraris]

29 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

One of the most powerful folk medicines is storytelling, the placebo effect on steroids. This doesn't work in wild animals, but there's some evidence it rubs off on domestic pets.

Just quoting you Maddy but replying about eating dung. Coprophagy (hetero/allo/auto) is a normal behaviour observed in both vertebrates and invertebrates.

Leaving invertebrates aside as there are a host of different reasons for this, vertebrates, particularly mammals, eat faeces for self-medication and to restore their microbiome when this has been compromised. Many young animals eat their mother's poo to build up "good bacteria" in their gut, which is part of an animal's immune system. When animals feel their microbiome has been depleted, they sometimes revert to coprophagic behaviour in an attempt to restore it (see dogs eating poo etc).

Some animals also self-anoint with faeces of other species, this has various purposes but think for example of canines wild and domestic rolling in poo 🙂

I am not familiar with the Ayurvedic remedies to talk about them but as a mildly gross and cool note, early doctors ate both human faeces and also drank urine in order to assess a patient's state of health. This is how diabetes mellitus and insipidus were discovered.. the doctors tasted the urine and found that in some cases it tasted sweet or blah (insipidus) 😜  I am no connoisseur of urine so I cannot vouch for this practice 😄

 

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Krystina Ferraris said:

Just quoting you Maddy but replying about eating dung. Coprophagy (hetero/allo/auto) is a normal behaviour observed in both vertebrates and invertebrates.

Leaving invertebrates aside as there are a host of different reasons for this, vertebrates, particularly mammals, eat faeces for self-medication and to restore their microbiome when this has been compromised. Many young animals eat their mother's poo to build up "good bacteria" in their gut, which is part of an animal's immune system. When animals feel their microbiome has been depleted, they sometimes revert to coprophagic behaviour in an attempt to restore it (see dogs eating poo etc).

Some animals also self-anoint with faeces of other species, this has various purposes but think for example of canines wild and domestic rolling in poo 🙂

I am not familiar with the Ayurvedic remedies to talk about them but as a mildly gross and cool note, early doctors ate both human faeces and also drank urine in order to assess a patient's state of health. This is how diabetes mellitus and insipidus were discovered.. the doctors tasted the urine and found that in some cases it tasted sweet or blah (insipidus) 😜  I am no connoisseur of urine so I cannot vouch for this practice 😄

I should have been clearer about the role of storytelling. I learned about coprophagy via a short childhood love affair with bunnies. (Replaced by an affair with snakes, I think. I still want a least weasel.)

I live in farm country, where poop and pee are foods (and medicines) for everything, at varying levels of indirection. Many religious rules and practices descend from observations, by our agrarian ancestors, of the world around us. In urban industrial societies, few of us make such observations, and depend on handed down wisdom. Millennia removed from those ancient direct observations, and with the scientific method in hand, though we recognize the germs of wisdom in ancient rules and practices, we now also see the errors and the mighty hand of the placebo effect at work.

The pendulum seems to swing between the new and the old  I am hopeful we’ll find an interesting and prosperous amalgam of both, but the fraction of us doing the direct observing will never return to that ancient level.

Your profession is safe, Krystina.

 

[Rolig Loon]

The placebo and its cousin, magical thinking, are wonderful cures. I can attest to the fact that I have cured myself of colds, headaches, rashes, and countless aches by drinking green tea (with or without additives like honey or ginger),  rubbing myself with odd ointments and with various leaves (some of which actually caused rashes, but that's another matter), and ingesting a range of vitamins and mineral supplements.  My great grandfather was a homeopathic doctor.  My mother, who knew him well when she was a child, became an avid cultivator of herbs and an enthusiastic devotee of Adele Davis.  She used to feed us meals laced with everything from wheat germ to daylily pods, skunk cabbage, and purslane, designed to keep us fit. 

Some of her concoctions made us gag, but many were quite good. I suspect that we survived in spite of them rather than specifically because of them. To this day, though, I occasionally reach involuntarily for some "cures" that my mother might have recommended if she were still here. I have little hard evidence that they really cure anything, but I'm buoyed by the thought that they might. Hence the power of the placebo.  And I'm still here, so something works.  Mom would understand.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[Krystina Ferraris]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Your profession is safe, Krystina.

 

Thanks Maddy 😅🔥

[Fay Starlight]

On 7/12/2022 at 11:30 AM, CaithLynnSayes said:

 To all the people born in the 90s,

 

 

I hope you all know you are all in a competition to be the last person alive from the 1900s in the future. Good luck, I hope you win.

🤞

Don't sweat the small stuff-- it's all small stuff lol!

[Silent Mistwalker]

7 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

When I was a kid, our dog would eat grass and throw up. Dad explained that something was upsetting Rocket's tummy, and he knew how to get rid of it. I asked how he "knew". He explained that dogs probably didn't "know," evolution did. Dogs just did random stuff, as they do, and those that did useful random stuff produced more and better puppies because they lived longer and healthier lives. If dogs were smarter, they wouldn't eat the stuff that upset their tummies in the first place, like my dirty underwear. He doubted there was much thinking involved, but rather that over millions of years, sensory mechanisms had evolved to make eating grass for a tummy ache a "no brainer". Grass smells yummy on an upset tummy? The recent introduction of dirty underwear hasn't given evolution enough time to "teach" dogs not to chow down on it.

Zoopharmacognosy is, of course, a lot more complex and interesting than that. Dad went on to tell me about pregnant elephants who sometimes ate the bark off of some tree to induce labor. African women, presumably having observed this behavior, made tea from that bark to do the same thing. He'd learned this sometime prior to WWII, while sailing around the South Pacific in a submarine. Imagine my amusement, decades later, (1990-ish) when I read of research by Dr.  Holly Dublin, revealing that pregnant elephants sometimes eat the bark off red syringa trees to induce labor. Who knew?!

https://asknature.org/strategy/eating-bark-to-induce-labor/

Somewhere along the way, human evolution traded away some lower level "sensory intelligence" for higher level thinking. As a result, we have to write down a lot of stuff other animals "know", and we seem to misplace the notes. Every few years I read an article expressing astonishment over the "discovery" that elephants and African women induce labor with herbs. They've been doing so forever and we knew it, but popular science can't seem to remember that. Keep better notes, people!

Unfortunately, old ways die hard, and the under-educated use of herbal remedies is on the rise...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291424/

Sometimes I just want to bring you home, hug you and squeeze you and call you George.

Although I had forgotten it ends with a spanking. 🤔

 

[Kiera Clutterbuck]

22 hours ago, Krystina Ferraris said:

Just quoting you Maddy but replying about eating dung. Coprophagy......

Hey I said on another thread I appreciated the spontaneous threads where we go off-topic, but this is going a bit too far!  😁😉

[Snugs McMasters]

16 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Sometimes I just want to bring you home, hug you (Maddy) and squeeze you and call you George.

56 minutes ago, Kiera Clutterbuck said:

23 hours ago, Krystina Ferraris said:

Just quoting you Maddy but replying about eating dung. Coprophagy......

Hey I said on another thread I appreciated the spontaneous threads where we go off-topic, but this is going a bit too far!  😁😉

Look, I warned about squeezing Maddy. And how you're trying to do it in a thread discussing Coprophagy?

I'm with Kiera, what the hell is wrong with you people?

Edited July 15, 2022 by Snugs McMasters

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Snugs McMasters said:

Look, I warned about squeezing Maddy. And how you're trying to do it in a thread discussing Coprophagy?

I'm with Kiera, what the hell is wrong with you people?

I knew if I couldn't get Dave to rise to the occasion, you would.

I can't see her posts. 🙈

[Arielle Popstar]

On 7/14/2022 at 4:10 PM, Rolig Loon said:

The placebo and its cousin, magical thinking, are wonderful cures. I can attest to the fact that I have cured myself of colds, headaches, rashes, and countless aches by drinking green tea (with or without additives like honey or ginger),  rubbing myself with odd ointments and with various leaves (some of which actually caused rashes, but that's another matter), and ingesting a range of vitamins and mineral supplements.  My great grandfather was a homeopathic doctor.  My mother, who knew him well when she was a child, became an avid cultivator of herbs and an enthusiastic devotee of Adele Davis.  She used to feed us meals laced with everything from wheat germ to daylily pods, skunk cabbage, and purslane, designed to keep us fit. 

Some of her concoctions made us gag, but many were quite good. I suspect that we survived in spite of them rather than specifically because of them. To this day, though, I occasionally reach involuntarily for some "cures" that my mother might have recommended if she were still here. I have little hard evidence that they really cure anything, but I'm buoyed by the thought that they might. Hence the power of the placebo.  And I'm still here, so something works.  Mom would understand.

A couple of interesting videos about the power of belief:

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

To all the people born in the 90's, including my own children. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that we couldn't realise our dreams of "love and peace" - as the cliche goes - for you and your children. I'm sorry that we took our eyes off the goal in the intervening decades, that we let complacency take the fire out of our bellies while the the same forces our parent's generation stormed beaches to fight against slithered back out into the world again instead of becoming as extinct as we had fooled ourselves into believing they were. That we deluded ourselves into thinking "it can't happen here" and let fall their oath of "Never again." That the fights our mothers and sisters fought and won for equality and autonomy were now to be fought all over again by our daughters.

We had such enormous dreams for the world you would be raising your children in.

And we blew it.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

To all the people born in the 90's, including my own children. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that we couldn't realise our dreams of "love and peace" - as the cliche goes - for you and your children. I'm sorry that we took our eyes off the goal in the intervening decades, that we let complacency take the fire out of our bellies while the the same forces our parent's generation stormed beaches to fight against slithered back out into the world again instead of becoming as extinct as we had fooled ourselves into believing they were. That we deluded ourselves into thinking "it can't happen here" and let fall their oath of "Never again." That the fights our mothers and sisters fought and won for equality and autonomy were now to be fought all over again by our daughters.

We had such enormous dreams for the world you would be raising your children in.

And we blew it.

A hug can say what words can't.

[Chassie Rowley]

12 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

To all the people born in the 90's, including my own children. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that we couldn't realise our dreams of "love and peace" - as the cliche goes - for you and your children. I'm sorry that we took our eyes off the goal in the intervening decades, that we let complacency take the fire out of our bellies while the the same forces our parent's generation stormed beaches to fight against slithered back out into the world again instead of becoming as extinct as we had fooled ourselves into believing they were. That we deluded ourselves into thinking "it can't happen here" and let fall their oath of "Never again." That the fights our mothers and sisters fought and won for equality and autonomy were now to be fought all over again by our daughters.

We had such enormous dreams for the world you would be raising your children in.

And we blew it.

Reading this post and Jesse Colin Young suddenly went through my head.

Eloquently stated.

[Silent Mistwalker]

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

6 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

I used to do that song with my wife and daughter.... Thank you for reminding me of it. I NEED to dust it off to work in a solo format