As the world continues to progress in technology and medicine, we continue to develop more and more effective cures for common ailments and rarer diseases.
Medical technology can advance in sudden bursts, such as with penicillin’s accidental discovery, which became the most common antibiotic and saved millions of lives with simple injections.
However, the human race didn’t just suffer and die from every little sniffle and cough it had before our modern era.
Even as little as a hundred years ago, medical technology was still primitive compared to what we have now.
And all of that was built based on what came before, what practices worked, and which remedies were rooted in scientific understanding.
Plants have always been the first go-to solution. If something’s wrong in the body, putting something right inside it has been the standard since we knew what food was as a species. And one plant has been ignored for its healing benefits.
A plant that has no complicated growth cycle or single biome in which it can routinely bloom. It’s a little, common stalky leaf called lettuce.
10 /10 Outdoor Pharmacy
This isn’t the grocery store aisle lettuce. Lactuca virosa, otherwise known as wild lettuce, or tall lettuce, is a specific kind of lettuce that is mostly found growing naturally along the coast of Great Britain and has since been spread around the world where it finds habitation in California, Australia, and even Pakistan.
It’s a highly endurant plant that can grow almost anywhere.
9 /10 Lettuce Milk
What makes the lettuce great enough to earn its name of “great lettuce” is what’s inside of its stem, specifically.
A milky white substance called lactucarium can be taken from the plant and used as a medicine that treats pain. It’s essentially a mild opiate or pain reliever, where the lettuce gets another name: Opium Lettuce.