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Healthy

Common Cold

Stomach aches

Mild influenza

Food poisoning

Influenza

Dysentery

Influenza whilst immune compromised

Ebola

Spanish flu

[martinuzz]

The main problem with plant medicine is that nature does not distribute substances homogenously through plants.
Take for example purple foxglove (digitalis purpurea).

It poduces a chemical that can save heartpatients' lives in exactly the right small dosage. It will kill you when over that dosage. Which is why digitalis is a popular household toxin used for murder. Grows in everyone's garden, kills reliably. Can't even be easily detected unless specifically looked for since death looks as if by natural heart attack.

Tip for fathers and mothers. If you have small kids, and foxglove in your garden, either make very sure to teach them to NEVER, EVER put it in their mouth, or remove the plants. Just a small taste can kill a child.

A lot of people died to overdosage in medieval times, when the plant's leaves and flowers were already used to treat heart failure.
No one leaf or flower holds exactly the same amount of active substance / weight unit. Nature's fickle like that.

Nowadays digitalis does not kill patients anymore, because pharmacists can now extract, concentrate, and exactly measure the substance when putting it into a pill.

[wierd]

Yup, which is why experimenters create protocols to standardize thier solutions, and exposure rates.

It is also why they attempt to determine which compounds in the heterogenous mix that is a plant extract are the active ingredients, then do more testing with varying proportions of the isolates.

That still does not negate the need for the first stage of that chain-- does the raw plant extract exceed placebo in rate of inhibition?

testing plant juice is not glamorous and does not give a good impact score in journals. It is deadly to a researcher's career, unless they find something that is "OMG, wow amazing!" that in unrefined plant juice form, just blows the socks off of refined pharmecuticals.

[scrdest]

At a guess, the 'They might attack our bodies!' thing which is pretty nonsensical, given the massive difference, both genetically and physically between bacteria and human cells.

You wound me, sir.

Just that I hear this worry a lot, and for the aforementioned reasons it's a fucking retarded worry.

And DOES the body react to phage viruses, or does the virus need to start infecting cells for the body to go 'Oh shit! We're under attack!'

Yep. It's a bunch of nonself DNA packed into nonself proteins. It might not be as immunogenic as, say, Endotoxin, but it will eventually start to get immunity'd to death.

[Bohandas]

shouldn't anti-rejection medication work for all that?

[Culise]

shouldn't anti-rejection medication work for all that?

When treating an illness, immunosuppressants typically aren't considered a good idea.  If necessary, they can be used for things like transplants, grafts, or overactive immune responses/autoimmune diseases, but intentionally weakening the immune system while it's actively fighting off an illness would seem to be counterproductive to me. 

[Loud Whispers]

Imagine that you're the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. You would like to fund a study. You have the choice to fund a study that will confirm/reject the usefulness of either:
A) An expensive drug that your company holds the patent to and that you can make a lot of money of if it works
B) A cheap, ubiquitous substance that you can't patent, and that if it works, anybody can bring to market
Even if the companies are honest, the simple fact of financial incentive tends to discourage certain types of research. That doesn't mean that everyone advertising his cureall for $5/bottle is genuine. But to assume that the companies making money off of you being sick are the grand holy sole and exclusive gateway to medicine is a mistake.

But that's not an "either" situation. If you ask me the more scandalous thing is taking a cheap ubiquitous substance anyone can bring to the market and then slapping a brand on it, jumping up the price a small bit and paying off with some advertising to make regular medicine seem more potent than literally the exact same medicine

[inteuniso]

Cannabis is incredibly effective at killing bacteria.

Cannabis is legal for medical purposes in the United States but the part you're living in might feel differently.

[Loud Whispers]

Cannabis is incredibly effective at killing bacteria.

Cannabis is legal for medical purposes in the United States but the part you're living in might feel differently.

"In the past cannabis wasn’t thought to be addictive. However, research has shown that it can be addictive, particularly if you have been using it regularly for quite a while. About 10% of regular cannabis users are thought to become dependent.

As with other addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin, you can develop a tolerance to it. This means you have to have more and more to get the same effects. If you stop taking it, you can experience withdrawal symptoms, such as cravings, difficulty sleeping, mood swings, irritability and restlessness.

If you regularly smoke cannabis with tobacco, you’re likely to get addicted to nicotine and may develop tobacco-related illnesses, such as cancer and coronary heart disease. If you cut down or give up, you will experience withdrawal from nicotine as well as cannabis.

If you smoke it, cannabis can be harmful to your lungs. Like tobacco, it contains cancer-causing chemicals (carcinogens) that increase your risk of lung cancer. It can also make asthma worse, and cause wheezing in people without asthma. If you mix cannabis with tobacco and smoke it, the risks to your lungs are higher.
Cannabis can harm your mental health. Regular use is associated with an increased risk of developing a psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia. A psychotic illness is one where you experience hallucinations (when you see things that aren’t really there) and delusions (when you believe things that aren’t really true). Your risk of developing a psychotic illness is higher if you start using cannabis in your teens and if you have a family history of mental illness. Cannabis use has also been shown to increase the risk of a relapse in people who have schizophrenia, and could make existing symptoms worse.
Cannabis may affect your fertility. Research done in animals suggests that cannabis can disrupt sperm production in males and ovulation in females.
If you are pregnant, cannabis may harm your unborn baby. Research suggests that using cannabis during pregnancy could affect your baby's brain development. Regularly smoking cannabis with tobacco is associated with an increased risk of your baby being born small or premature.

Herbal cannabis contains many different compounds, called cannabinoids, which have different effects. Two of these cannabinoids – tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) – are the active ingredients of a prescribed drug called Sativex. Currently this is only licensed in the UK as a treatment to relieve the pain of muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis.

Further research is under way to test the effectiveness of cannabis-based drugs for a range of other conditions including the eye disease glaucoma, appetite loss in people with HIV or AIDS, epilepsy in children and pain associated with cancer. We won’t know whether or not these treatments are effective until trials have concluded.
From the National Health Service of the UK"

Looking for the antibacterial uses:
ABC reporting on Brits and Italians doing med research, 7 years ago they found non-psychoactive extracts from cannabis plants could be utilized to create a potent antiobiotic cream that could kill external infections of exposed wounds like MRSA.

[Bumber]

If you regularly smoke cannabis with tobacco, you’re likely to get addicted to nicotine and may develop tobacco-related illnesses, such as cancer and coronary heart disease. If you cut down or give up, you will experience withdrawal from nicotine as well as cannabis.
...
Regularly smoking cannabis with tobacco is associated with an increased risk of your baby being born small or premature.

Umm... doesn't tobacco alone do that? I wonder why it even bears mentioning.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Cannabis+Tobacco has a negative synergistic effect.

[inteuniso]

Cannabis+Tobacco has a negative synergistic effect.

Tobacco has a negative effect.

Arguably humanity would be a lot better off if we didn't muck with nightshade.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Cannabis+Tobacco has a negative synergistic effect.

Tobacco has a negative effect.

Arguably humanity would be a lot better off if we didn't muck with nightshade.

What it means is that the harms from using tobacco and cannabis isn't Tobacco+Cannabis, it's Tobacco*Cannabis.

[Egan_BW]

Cannabis+Tobacco has a negative synergistic effect.

Tobacco has a negative effect.

Arguably humanity would be a lot better off if we didn't muck with nightshade.

Potatos and tomatos. If you're saying we shouldn't eat these, you objectively have bad taste in plants.