Indigenous medicine a fusion of ritual and remedy

12 hours ago by Graham Jones The smoke from burning emu bush was used by Indigenous healers for a number of different rituals. Tony Rodd/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

In traditional Indigenous Australian society, healers used plants in tandem with precise ritual. Thousands of years later, we're beginning to understand the science underlying these medicines.

A variety of plant species were used in "smoking ceremonies", where the aim was usually to produce a wet steamy smoke. This was inhaled or exposed to certain body parts as part of a healing ceremony.

Plants could also be made into a poultice using animal fats for topical treatment of a variety of skin ailments. Others were chewed, with some kept in a bolus in the mouth over many hours.

Australia has an abundance of endemic aromatic plants which yield high levels of essential oil. Even though Indigenous Australians didn't have the technology to extract essential oils via hydrodistillation, particular properties of aromatic plants in various healing methods, such as smoking ceremonies, were widely used.

Importantly, Aborigines were hunter gatherers not cultivators so there was little intentional interference with natural selection of native plants. The extreme chemovariability within and between species of aromatic Australian plants must be seen within this context.

Eremophila is 'number one'

Eremophila species were regarded by many Indigenous groups as their "number one medicine".

Most Eremophila species have characteristic smells which were key to their selection by Indigenous healers. In such cases, therapeutic activity was probably partly mediated by small volatile compounds (the ones responsible for smell), and Indigenous informants have told my research team that they select for the most aromatic specimens when foraging for medicines.

The leaves of the emu bush (E. longifolia) in particular were placed on hot embers for traditional therapeutic use. The resultant wet steamy smoke possibly inhibited bacterial or fungal pathogens, as well as providing a stimulus for milk let-down in women after childbirth.

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Indigenous medicine a fusion of ritual and remedy