Indigenous people have been using various components of native Australian flora and some fauna as medicine for thousands of years, and a minority turn to healers in their communities for medications aimed at providing physical and spiritual healing.
Today, traditional healers and medicines have been incorporated into modern clinical settings to help treat sick Indigenous people within some healthcare networks.
Traditional medicine has been defined as the sum of the total knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health,[1] as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness.
Bush medicine is also connected to the holistic worldview in such a way that the interplay between the physical, emotional, social and spiritual aspects is crucial in attaining wellbeing.
[5] Aboriginal concepts of illness and pain and its causes are quite different from western medicine; for example, a severe headache may be attributed to an evil spirit having taken up residence in the head.
The nectar-laden liquid from banksia flowers was used as a cough syrup, and from the native grapes (Cissus hypoglauca) a throat gargle was made.
In Warrabri, Northern Territory, one believed cure for earache is squeezing the fatty part of a witchetty grub into the sore ear.
[13] Aboriginal people believe that their healers, their "medicine men", have special powers which are bestowed upon them by their spiritual ancestors to heal.
An example of such ritual would be singing, massaging and sucking to remove a foreign object that has entered the body, and invoking the power of the war god Ancestor Ngurunderi to heal the wounds of soldiers caused by spears and clubs.
[2] A medicine developed by Aboriginal peoples of the eastern states of Australia, from the soft corkwood tree, or Duboisia myoporoides, was used by the Allies in World War II to stop soldiers getting seasick when they sailed across the English Channel on their way to liberate France and defeat Hitler during the Invasion of Normandy.
It had been flown over to Europe and developed in great secrecy by Canadian researchers, before the "mystery pill" was dispensed to every participating soldier for the massive military operation, which was pivotal to winning the war but had been delayed several times because of seasickness.
Later, it was found that the same medicine could be used in the production of the tropane alkaloid drugs, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, which are useful for eye surgery, and a multi-million dollar industry was built in Queensland based on this substance.