Bush medicine

Bush medicine comprises traditional medicines used by Indigenous Australians, being Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 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. Traditional methods of healing have underwritten the development of non-Indigenous medicines throughout history. One notable example would be the development of aseasickness medication. 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, 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. The modern world and Aboriginal cultures have differing approaches for health. Whilst conventional medicine deals with direct causes of illness and science-based views of health, the Aboriginal view on health as defined by the National Aboriginal Health Strategy considers "not just the physical well being of the individual, but the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole community. This is the whole-of-life view and it also includes the cyclical concept of life-death-life". Broadly, most human societies see the manifestation of illness as natural, human or supernatural. According to Patrick Maher, the traditional Aboriginal model of illness sees social and spiritual dysfunction as a cause of illness, while supernatural intervention is regarded as the main cause of serious illness.