Aboriginal medical science, for example, is fine and good as long as you live in a nomadic hunter-gatherer mode without access to modern medicine and in which your lifespan is bounded by countless ways of achieving an early departure from life ..... knowledge of some beneficial herbs is helpful, but does not meaningfully affect outcomes of illnesses, since most such treatments, like consuming spirits to dull pain, are topical rather than curative - treating the symptoms rather than the cause... often the patient feels better as he/she passes away. 

Some wonderful things came from local tribal knowledge - cinca bark, for example ... ephedrine in bark .. and these have lead to refined scientific topical medications.  Treating malaria with quinine is topical ... doesn't kill the bugs in the bloodstream... ephedrine - refined into pseudoephedrine - does not solve runny noses etc... it merely stops the symptoms.. it is a topical treatment not a cure.

There is nothing wrong with Indigenous lore - but there is a lot not right with it as the same time ... and much of it is as much poppy-cock as the idea that a purebred bitch dog will never breed true again if impregnated by a mongrel... DUH... there are still people who imagine they believe that... on their flat earth... sailed round the world touching all four corners!!

People of certain religious persuasions have in recent years been punished for trying to 'cure' (often children) those 'possessed' or whatever their religion says ..... which has often lead to the death of the person being 'cured'.  Filling the sweat lodge with smoke is not going to cure asthma..... or stop blood thinning and causing heart problems... a ritual dance is not going to cure cancer.... infected crocodile bites don't go away when the magic feather is waved over the victim ...

Jeez - the way things are... when you live remote and 'traditional' .... some might even leave dropping the bundle until it's too late to summon the free RFDS flight for that Wharte Man's medicine.... a last minute decision to drop the bundle the traditional way etc, and then changing the mind, will result in an airport birth!!

Sir Eoin O Fada wrote on Dec 14^th, 2024 at 1:06pm:

That is just flagrant(!) wacism.

An Indigenous mother in the Northern Territory has allegedly been killed at the hands of her husband following a day of drinking hand sanitiser, marking the first domestic-violence related death in Australia for 2025.

It follows a horrific year of domestic-violence related deaths involving alleged killers with lengthy criminal records in the Territory, with the latest death no exception – the accused is said to have a criminal record dating back to 1997 and a court-ordered good behaviour bond expiring in Nov­ember, which had been breached.

On Monday, the 51-year-old woman was allegedly killed by her 49-year-old partner, who has not yet been charged, along the Todd River, with sources telling The Australian the couple had been drinking hand sanitiser in the lead-up to her death, where she was allegedly struck with a rock.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, drinking of hand sanitiser has become a silent epidemic in the NT, with authorities raising concerns only at the end of last year.

On Sunday morning, a 14 year-old girl was arrested by police in Darwin after she twice bit a police officer when she was seen to be “chroming”.

The Australian can reveal the man arrested over the latest death had been released from an 18-month long good behaviour bond in November 2024.

That bond had previously been breached, and had been put in place after the man served four months in prison in January 2023 for aggravated assault.

In June last year, he was sentenced to one month in jail for breaching a domestic violence order, and to five days for breach of bail and stealing a bottle of ­whiskey.

It is understood police are investigating the couple’s domestic violence-related history.

In the last few days of 2024, NT police commissioner Michael Murphy flagged that he “might” implement hand sanitiser regu­lations in the Territory.

He told the NT News in December that locals were buying hand sanitiser and non-­alcoholic beer and mixing them together.

There have been multiple instances of people appearing before the courts for fighting and assaults over hand sanitiser, and of hand sanitiser at Alice Springs hospital having to be secured from theft.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in Alice Springs, local shops initially glued and chained hand sanitiser bottles to registers due to thefts, before removing them completely when locals would squirt the liquid into soft drink bottles.

Darren Clark, baker and founder of Alice Springs anti-crime social media group Action for Alice, said he had to remove hand sanitiser from his bakery during and after Covid-19 because of repeated thefts.

“The older women would come in a group of two or three and just distract you, and one of them would take the entire bottle,” Mr Clark said.

In August, the Northern Territory government announced it would review the Sentencing Act following The Australian’s revelations that a string of murders in the Territory were allegedly committed by men with violent criminal histories who could have still been in custody had they received lengthier sentences.

In one case, a man who cut through his partner’s achilles tendon after a three-decade history of assaulting women was charged with murder in August after being released from prison less than a year beforehand, when he was sentenced to less than one-third of the maximum sentence by the Territory’s chief justice.

In another case in October, involving a man who alleged fatally stabbed his wife to death in Darwin, the accused had a violent history against women and in 2018 kicked his wife in the face and used a “nulla nulla” to fracture her legs, resulting in her being flown to ­hospital.

One Aboriginal woman allegedly murdered by her partner in ­Darwin last year, after police were requested by Territory Families and neighbours to conduct a welfare check just nine hours earlier, had almost 200 mostly domestic violence–related entries in the police system.