The stories of Propecia and St. John s wort demonstrate how Western culture has turned its back on ancient medicine, Riddle says. He places some of the blame on the development of universities as the centers for institutional learning. Chinese and Islamic cultures, Riddle adds, never developed this distrust. The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization made up of nearly 159,000 chemists and chemical engineers around the world. The abstract for Dr. John Riddle s ACS presentation follows.
Many uses involve the endocrine system, a theoretical concept, which the ancients lacked.
Nevertheless, the Ebers and Kahun papyri from ancient Egypt, the Greek writings attributed to Hippocrates, and later medical works contain many empirical substances administered for purposes that we rediscovered are effective agents. Modern biochemistry can explain their mechanisms of action. After discussing examples of retrospective discoveries of ancient drugs, I shall propose how a distrust of folk medicine developed in Western cultures but not in Islamic or Chinese cultures. A return to a critical appreciation of ancient medicine could provide new ways of treating disease. This site is maintained by the NC State University News Services office.