Traditional medicine doesn't just fill up the health food aisle at the supermarket - it could help make everybody healthier. But how can we figure out which ancient herbal remedies actually work, and which ones are just hype? An estimated 10,000 to 53,000 plant species were traditionally used as medicines, and only some of those could have bioactive molecules with actual molecules. That's a lot of plants to sort through.
But now, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that we can find out - by comparing the plants that multiple different cultures adopted as remedies.
For example, say a plant often used to cure headaches in an ancient Nepalese culture was closely related to a plant used for the same purpose in South Africa. The communication-crippling geographical distance between these two cultures indicates that they discovered their headache cures independently. So they probably began using these plants because the flora had real pain-killing abilities. This plant family may produce valuable bioactive compounds.
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