ARTYKUŁ

Simona Kossak

Samoleczenie zwierząt i ludzi
2007-08-11

Self-treatment of animals and humans. On the basis of many years of observations of wild animals, especially deers, an author justifies her thesis that self-treatment exists in the animal world. It is based on the oldest instinct - the nutritional instinct, the roots of which sticks in the selectivity of cell membranes which evolved during billions of years. She gives several very convincing examples of deer's behavior which have clear features of self-treatment. As concerns humans, driving force of self-treatment of primitive people was also nutritional instinct, but they were also very good observers and could use some observations of animal behavior to treat their own ailments and disease. But it is erroneous to claim that primitive man learned "natural medicine" from animals as they did not know physiology of animals and was not able to recognize their illnesses. The simple method of "attempts and errors" was to dangerous. An author defends also natural drugs which were successfully used for thousands of years and which unfortunately has been mocked and rejected by modern medicine in spite that many of them has found rational confirmation in scientific laboratories.