So I guess the old guys kicking around back 1,000+ years ago weren’t so dumb after-all.
First Plato, Seneca, Pythagoras, DaVinci, Hasselhoff, and now a guy named Bald. -Who wrote something called a Leechbook. One of the earliest medical textbooks known.
I know, I know, whenever you hear about old remedies you think of alchemy, bloodletting, witches & Monty-Python. -But not so fast.
Because while many people would have gotten things back then described as, “-Tis but a fleshwound!”, they also would have gotten infected & gone septic -fast. Imagine that in the year 815 with no antibiotics! Ouch. -Or so it would seem…
And so, in an interesting set of experiments, the team at Nottingham University led by Christina Lee & Freya Harrison found one little formula that kinda works.
On styes.
-Oh, and it also kills a modern Superbug in the year 2015.
Like,… FREAKING MRSA!
And not in just the isolated cells of the usual non-real-world experiements, but the also in the supertough biofilms so characteristic to that bug.
Which is the absolute. last. thing. the scientists expected to discover.
With weird requirements like 2 Different kinds of garlic, Brass-vessel-boiling, Resting for 9 days, etc. the AncientBiotics guys probably thought they were in for a laugh, maybe even an explosion or two. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
But apparently, the salve works so well it kills 99.9% of all MRSA.
And the strangest part of it is, that although the doctors expected the concoction to have -Some- effect, because a few of the ingredients are studied & showed positive results individually, what they didn’t expect is The Combination’s effect. -At all.
They noted that somehow the mixture of all these ingredients together and processed as-directed does more than any of the components, and a LOT more than anyone would expect.
-Not only that, but when another microbiologist colleague was asked by them to check their work for errors at a completely different facility over in Texas, *and also in a much-more real-world infected-wound setting, her conclusions were that Eyesalve performed as-well, or even better than some modern antibiotics we have today.
Furthermore, fearing they’d just gotten lucky, Freya’s team made more batches, and each time they worked and also retained potency for quite a long time.
What’s interesting, is that perhaps the new discovery of a very old medicine might lead to future innovations on how to eradicate the Superbugs of today and tomorrow.
One of the keys to this will probably be Eyesalve’s interesting ability to block the signals bacteria-cells send back and forth to eachother; even when it’s highly diluted.
And honestly, this 1,000+ year-old discovery couldn’t come at a better time, with so few new drugs in the pipeline and the beginning of what might be a post-antibiotic era.
I guess the Dark Ages weren’t so dark after-all.
Check out the links for the details about medicine’s days of future past…
Photo/Video Credits: University of Nottingham Ancient Biotics Project, The British Library
Links:
• Source: U.Nottingham-AncientBiotics
• via: Neatorama
• More Coverage: Telegraph | CNN
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