“Wilde Als (wormwood) puts oxygen in your body.” My mother said this with so much authority, that you could swear she had several medical degrees. Turns out she got this information from her friend who did a Google search on the benefits of the Artemisia plant.
Some of my childhood ailments were treated with the “Als” plant. We had one growing in our yard. It had a strange smell, and my mother would brew it when I had a bit of a sniffle. She would also warm whole spices in a pan and put them in a towel and place it on my tummy ache. These home remedies worked, but ask any of those sage proponents why they worked, and you’d be hard pressed to get a conclusive answer.
And that’s the concern now as so many people are sprouting “home remedies” as cures for a virus that has proven a test of medical and political will. Madagascar has bottled the extract of the Artemisia plant as the cure for covid-19, but there’s no conclusive answer on how it helps with various ailments.
This virus is new. There are many theories, even doctors are learning about it daily. The right and wrong ways to treat these symptoms are being formulated as covid-19 takes hold in the world’s population.
The dreaded “Rona”, much like the malaria parasite, directly infects the red blood cells. It targets the haemoglobin, which is responsible for transporting oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. If my mother’s friend had Googled a bit further, she would have found that extracts of this “miracle” plant are present in antimalarial medication. These molecules appear to work in diverse ways for protecting haemoglobin against infection, hence their possible successful use against covid-19.
But the World Health Organisation is vilified for clarifying that it will only endorse Madagascar’s “covid cure” once clinical trials prove that it is a successful means to treat the novel coronavirus. Why not get the science of how this potential cure works first, before telling everyone to use it?
Aspirin alleviates headaches, but people on blood-thinning medication cannot use it. That’s because we know that a combination of the two could be detrimental. (The combined use of warfarin plus aspirin substantially increases the risk of major bleeding side effects).
So why are people more willing to take the advice of some lay person, rather than medical practitioners and scientists who literally understand how the virus works?
And when media provide the public access to these scientists, to educate them about the dreaded covid-19, they are dismissed for spewing “mainstream” propaganda.
George Orwell wrote, “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”
I suppose this is reinforced in the 21st century, as we are exposed to social media platforms that draw on our search preferences and feed those back to us. So you’re constantly exposed to something that you “know already”, reinforcing that narrative, but to the point of disregarding new information.
And the ability to interrogate that new information is also limited, because our brains are not used to that kind of thinking any more. And the possibility of a rational disagreement is also rare.
But in this time of corona, and the availability of varying theories and facts about the virus, truth is subjective. My truth of covid-19 is different to my mother’s friend, who chooses “alternative” sources of information. Is it verified, tried and tested?
Who cares? It’s the truth, and then there are the facts.
The author is a genius!
Oh wow! Thank you for the compliment. If only this “genius” was consistent with her blogging.