The problem with most herbal medicines is that they don’t do anything and aren’t based in any kind of science. You might see a book claiming that “the celts used it to treat scrofula” or whatever, but that doesn’t mean that it actually does stuff. There is a persistent belief that old timey herbalists knew how to treat all sorts of maladies by collecting herbs, but it’s just a classic example of the “appeal to the ancients” logical fallacy and the “appeal to nature” fallacy combined with a decent amount of “noble savage”.

Going back a couple hundred years, outcomes of a person visiting an herbalist and a person visiting a mainstream physician would potentially be in the favor of the herbalist cause doing nothing was better than whatever the mainstream physician was doing.

That all said, there definitely are plant/animal/fungi based things that do have real physiological effects. The problem is that dosing is difficult. Aspirin, aka acetylsalicilic acid, can be made easily from salicylic acid and acetic anhydride. The salicylic acid is the part that has effects, but it can be hard on your stomach by itself. Salicylic acid (or compounds that metabolize to it) can be obtained from willow bark, some birches, and wintergreen. Wintergreen itself can be a little bit of a topical analgesic (methyl-salicilate in it is an ingredient in bengay).

Quinine really helps malaria.

Opium obviously works, but maybe dont make it.

Some plants that people used historically to treat constipation or to staunch bleeding will probably work cause it’s pretty obvious if they do.

There are books and other resources on evidence based herbal medicines, but it’s really important to consider the type of evidence. There are a million studies showing certain compounds have potential effects on certain processes, or real effects shown in vitro, but it all gets beaten by randomized, controlled, trials (and ideally, meta-analyses).

Lastly, keep in mind that herbal remedies are often portrayed as low-risk, but that shouldn’t be the case, either because there are plenty of ways for them to have negative effects or interfere with other medicines.

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective’s work may be of interest to you

I suppose the closest think I know of in relation to an effort of DIY medicine is the Open Insulin Foundation. Actually, to my understanding it’s more of a DIT (Do It Together) thing:

We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. This model will ensure communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and that people living with diabetes and their communities own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive.

From another point of view, I believe that herbalism is quite relevant to your question, in the sense that the vast majority of medicine through out time and all over the world, come from plants. I embarked on this journey 1-2 years back and it’s like I started rediscovering the world around me.

One of he great things with herbalism is that it’s easy to do your own tinctures and mixtures, and use them also to prevent stuff. For example this autumn I made a mix to boost my immune system and I didn’t get sick all winter for the first time in years. Just to be clear, I use both western medicine and herbalism, and I am not against vaccines.

Btw this is herbalism@slrpnk.net

Nah, moving past basic herbs is going to require a lab.

Diclaimer: I studied biology but failed biochemistry with a crash.

It is hard. Often, medically used molecules are complex, manufacturing typically has many steps (higher chance that something goes wrong), typically one wants high purity (have to get high purity raw material) some especially annoying substances have right- and left-handed forms and other isomers - the atom count matches, but the arrangement doesn’t and in biological systems, arrangement matters.

Some things are doable. If the molecule in question is produced by a microbe that’s easy to cultivate, even complex molecules can be produced with DIY methods.

So if there’s a nuclear war and you need antibiotics after the dust settles, you can probably set up penicillin production in a few weeks. It all starts with leaving some bread in a dark and damp place to invite fungi, picking the right-looking colony, replicating it, testing it against a dish of bacteria, if it passes the check for having antibiotic effect, then replicating it more and more, harvesting, purifying, stabilizing, storing… (Reality check: you’d be producing really small amounts of an outdated antibiotic to which there’s widespread resistance.)

[Disclaimer: unless you know what you’re doing, don’t do this at home.]

The only time I’ve done DIY medicine was to help a dachshound with a skin tumour. Since my mother has no other dachshound, there was no control group. The dachshound is old and was not fit enough for a removal operation. Knowing that tumour immunotherapy for dogs was unavailable where I live (and ridiculously expensive where it might be available), I did the crude thing. Visiting every evening, I powdered some siberian chaga (tree fungus) and nutritional yeast (deactivated yeast) and mixed a small quantity of them in wound cleaning alcohol (to ensure all microbes would be dead in the mixture). Cleaned up the tumour with a peroxide solution (it initially bled every day) and put some droplets of the fungus/alcohol mixture on it - to provoke the immune system with quite clear message “look, I’m a hostile fungus and there’s two of us, if you don’t act now, we’ll mess up everything”. The reasoning was that the tumour microenvironment had likely locally deactivated immune response and “trolling” it with fungal antigens would activate it (licensed medics do it with far more potent bacterial antigens, to which I had no reliable access). Result: tumour went into remission and dachshound still lives, but it’s not a very happy life because he was already ill at the beginning in multiple other ways - ways that I would be hard pressed to influence at all, no matter how hard I tried to synthesize anything - so I don’t. Some of the medications cost 100 € per month, but it still makes sense to buy them.

P.S.

If you’re prescribed antibiotics (many now come in two components, main ingredient and resistance preventing secondary ingredient), you can always add garlic to your menu to make it extra hard for bacteria to develop resistance. You won’t find out if it did you any good, but chances are it might.

I know there is a group all about anarchist biohacking called The Four Theives Vinegar Collective.

The dubious fields of Naturopathy and Traditional Chinese Medicine might have some things to say about herbal medicines, but like I say, dubious. Take them with a grain of salt, might be useful in some kind of fallout society. I’d still stick with aspirin, paracetamol and antibiotics were they available.

Beyond basic herbs, it could get risky. Usually, the intervals between no effect, healing effect, and deadly effect are small. Often, chirality gives you a mixture of good medicine and deadly enantiomers (cf. Thalidomide scandal). Not to say, basic herbs can be quite powerful. Mint is a known potent painkiler, chamomille has great antiinflammatory effects.

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