Did you know that the medicines we use today are the result of a long-standing medicinal tradition that goes way back in time. Think of ancient China with its traditional medicine (3000 BC), ancient Egypt (around 2000 BC) and the old traditions within the African tribes.
This medicine developed mainly within one's own country and within one's own culture, but with the increase of trade routes and the migration of people, the development of medicine was influenced by it. Via the Greeks and the Romans, part of that knowledge ended up in Western Europe, where this information was written down and stored. That was not surprising, because many monastic orders studied this information, were educated, could write and also mastered the art of printing.
One of those Greeks was Hippocrates, who is considered the founder of Western medicine. But make no mistake Hippocrates was originally a herbalist and not a physician.
In this article, we focus a little more on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). TCM is one of the oldest healing methods using medicinal mushrooms. Not for their hallucinatory effects, but because of the fact that mushrooms contain a lot of essential sugars, antioxidants and essential amino acids, in addition to other trace elements. Unfortunately, we do not get enough of these in our current diet.
It would be nice if we would pay more attention to these beautiful natural products. That if you walk through the forest and you see the fairy bench or the Maitake and sometimes the cordyceps grow, we are again amazed at the beauty of nature.
In fact, we know so little about mushrooms. We are literally at the beginning of our journey through the world of mushrooms. Estimates give numbers of 150,000 species of mushrooms, of which we have only mapped 15,000 and use 800 for their medicinal properties.
In a subsequent article we would like to focus on what mushrooms can do for you: in slowing down aging, dealing with serious diseases and losing weight.
