We have something of the opposite problem over here. There are a number of vitamin supplements (again can't recall exactly which, and cannot be arsed googling :P) which are about to be heavily regulated to the point that effective quantities won't be available over the counter at healthfood stores. One of them is particularly helpful for menopausal women and there's been a big campaign to save the supplements. They've been available for years, but new EU rules are starting to impact. Under British law they were absolutely fine and actually quite effectively regulated ( i think).

Sometimes. Sometimes it's the intended ingredient.

mercury was used for years as a medicine in the west. Until it became clear that it wasn't so much helping as poisoning the patents :P

To be fair, it did technically treat syphilis. The mercury killed you slower than the syphilis, that's all.

But there were also lots of folks drinking straight mercury for general health, which was of course not a wise plan. :)

I'm a fan of that "until".
That's a common issue with alternative medicine. Something may work in particular circumstances, and it becomes a cureall. Chiropracty may help certain back pain, and people use it for arthritis.

And leeches can be good to prevent clotting, but they're useless at best for... almost everything they used to be used for.

I reckon that ole practice of drillin into yer head to relieve a headachey wern't not none too wise neever, but hey its natural riggghhhttt.

Nonsense: just pop a couple under your tongue and allow them to dissolve slowly...

(prizes for anyone who gets that comedy reference).

Once again, trepanning does have a legitimate medical use. There was a news article just recently about how it saved a little girl's life when she had pressure building up in her skull from a brain hemmorhage after getting hit in the head with a baseball in her backyard. Her only symptom was a severe headache. (It was news because the parents only bothered to take her to the ER after they saw a news program about Natasha Richardson. Had they let the girl just go to bed with some Tylenol, she would have died.)

You have to have a certain baseline of respect for the empirical evidence that any group of people collects, even if no one knows or remembers the why behind it. There was, for example, a tribe in Africa which became quite worshipped by the locals for awhile, because they had discovered a magical shamanistic cure for disease. Anthropologists visited, and watched the entire ritual, which involved hours of dancing, chanting, taking certain sacred fruits from special trees, praying over them, hoisting the fruit in a basket over a sacred river, spending another full week or two dancing, singing, etc. etc. etc... then the gods had "blessed" the sacred fruit, the sick person ate it, and they got better. Well of course what the anthropologists realized was the fruit got moldy while it sat out there for two weeks, and the tribe was growing freaking penecillin right there in the basket. Their belief in why it worked was misguided, but the fact remained that this tribe had discovered a cure for these sick people after all. They were not lying, they were not imagining the results. They could have saved a lot of time and energy if they had used the scientific method to further pinpoint the results they were seeing, but they were nonetheless producing results.

Iwas joking about them thar olden days ya cloddy

I can't find any evidence on the internets of an African tribe accidentally discovering penicillin.

No....but there have been plenty of societies who have accidentally discovered aspirin.

:notworthy Man, I cannot even imagine how to look for such a thing nor how long I would last searching for it.

Don't know what to tell you. In the old days, shit was in books, and this was in a book on my dad's shelf that I read when I was about 17. I'll ask him if he remembers which one I'm talking about. If everything were available online, Dana would never have to go to the University library.

actual real statistics I just made up:
 

The internet gives us quick access to 1% of the information in the world. Library sciences are still needed for the remaining 99%.

And...I wouldn't have had to spend $40 (incl postage) for a book about 18th C Infantry ...which I just did.