OLEANDER UPDATE (Last post I promise!)

If you missed the first post about this subject, Oleander is a shrub which is toxic, but has been used ancetodaly in traditional forms of medicine to treat a number of conditions. There was ONE US university study which showed that oleander extract inhibited the SARS-Cov-2 virus in the kidneys of primates.

Although we are pretty darn similar to primates genetically (about 96% identical genes, which by the way is about how similar we are also to mushrooms!), we are not primates. Nor are we mice, rats or rabbits so studies on animals do NOT necessarily translate to humans. Our physiologies differ. Primates live perfectly fine with the HIV and EBOLA virus in their bodies but Humans clearly do not. Animal studies do provide valuable information, if done ethically, but to start taking a compound from a plant known to kill humans just because our ill-informed President or the former crack-addict founder of My Pillow thinks we should is lunacy. 

I think that it is arrogant for Western medicine to think of itself as “modern medicine” since it has been around for only 200 years or so. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Native American medicine… these “alternative” forms of medicine have been based on 1000s of years of knowledge about how the natural world interacts with humans. They understand how plants interact with the body and interact with other plants. Just because those practitioners may have had some results with some conditions using a plant extract, does not mean that we should all just run out and start pounding the stuff. Unfortunately, as soon as anything becomes identified as possibly helpful or is dubbed as the latest “superfood”, every shyster and their grandmother starts producing it trying to make a buck. That fact, along with the fact that the supplement industry is completely unregulated, leads to a lot of, at best useless supplements, to at worst, lethal concoctions available with no oversight. Many studies have shown that supplements randomly sampled from store shelves have contained NO active ingredient to 100x of time more than what the label indicates. Buyer beware!

Stop relying on miracle cures.

Do the things you know help:

WEAR A MASK.

DISTANCE

WASH YOUR HANDS

DON’T TOUCH YOUR FACE

GET HEALTHY

VENTILATE

Stay safe and be well. 

AC 😎✌️🌱❤🐖🏃🏻🧘🏻‍♂️🌎😷