I'm using banana skins to treat wounds, its great, makes the wounds heal much better and they also offer that good protection!! I don't know the science behind it, I heard a lot of women talking about using it on the breast when breast feeding to feel better so I started to experiment with myself and I'm very happy with it too.
My mom would give me these white sugar pills when I was a kid and when I woke up saying I was sick (I had a phase where I did that often to avoid school). They'd just happen to treat my condition specifically and always made me feel better!
This is why I grew up to learn to only trust medical studies over anecdote. Even then it's good to be skeptical. Placebo can be incredibly powerful.
Sounds like it works and achieved the intended effect. This is why I grew past my "I only believe what the scientists tell me to" phase and decided to selectively trust medical studies, since it's my life and my anecdote, and I'll decide what does or does not work in my anecdote.
Learning to appreciate the results of medical grade studies does not translate to blindly accepting the results of any result some scientist claims.
I was merely pointing out the persuasive power of placebo affect which has resulted in a billion dollar 'holistic' industry to treat medical conditions and my personal experience growing up with someone who believes that non-sense. Which gave me a strong bias towards scientific results over 'natural' ones.
Only the banana peel is not that placebo since it offers really good protection even though if it don't have any healing property. The last time I used banana peel was when I accidentally got two toes's nails removed at once! I went to the hospital and they just made a bandage but when I got home and replaced them with banana peels, something like if my nails were the banana peels, the inside part of the peel touching my skin (or meat?) and i felt so much better than the hospital's bandage that I could even wear shoes, it was 5 months ago. I tried to search for some science I found only this: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0102-86502013000100006&... but they tested unriped and I just use the inside part of the peel of a ripe banana, I didn't find anything so specific yet, I need to dig deeper.
There are two dangers in what you are saying here.
Firstly, The thing is about the placebo effect, is that it is an actual effect.
Placebos are tough to account for in studies specifically because they actually DO help, for something to have medicinal properties it needs to have a greater effect than a placebo. Placebos even have been known to work when people know they are placebos.
The second one is that humans are terrible at self diagnosis / analysis, we are way too emotionally influenced, too biased, and there are too many variables to make conclusions on treating yourself. That's where scientific studies do a good job of removing biases and variability from the equation.
I'm not saying banana peels definitely don't help, because I honestly don't have a bloody clue, but I would caution telling other people about it with such certainty until there is some well researched initial evidence behind it.
There's a huge field of research here. It's shocking to me how people jump in to disparage the commenter when it takes just a few seconds to check if there's research - try Googling "plantains wound healing site:nih.gov"
Because there are hundreds of studies, and everyone's better served by looking at what's out there for themselves. I could have linked to the Google search, but that would've been pretty condescending.
While that's true, I and many other people on here aren't qualified to decide which are compelling. Since you seem to be purporting to have those qualifications, why not link to a few notable studies, or an applicable literature review, instead of saying "search for this".
"Since you seem to be purporting to have those qualifications" - which qualifications did I purport to have? Googling to verify that research does indeed exist?
We all, by merit of commenting here and having access to the Internet, have these qualifications.
I agree with everything your saying, but he did link to an actual study which provides some support. Further, a lot of our drugs like aspirin where discovered in nature. So, while far from enough evidence to change my behavior it is interesting.
It wasn't my intention to be sarcastic, english is my second language so maybe it was that, but anyway my main source is that its a tradicional and indigenous use of banana peel (thanks for pointing out its not skin. I never tried to search for the science behind it, I found this:
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0102-86502013000100006&...
You didn't come off as sarcastic. It sounded to me that you were matter of factly pointing out something that you use as a skin remedy, in an entirely unoffensive way. Don't worry about it, your English is fine.
There's actually a lot of research behind what you're talking about -- you'll find more looking for plantain or "Plantago Major L" and search NIH (restrict the search using site:nih.gov if you're using Google or DuckDuckGo).
