Sorry. I don't believe it.
Maybe used to alleviate some of the symptoms that diabetics presented -- but I don't believe the Bedouins "traditionally" had clue one about even the existence of diabetes let along how to treat it.
The most likely scenario is common to many medicines- people consumed it, most likely as a seasoning or steeped in hot water, then noticed that they felt better. That’s how the Greeks and Native Americans discovered ASA (willow bark extract) before Bayer figured out how to make it from coal tar.
Analysis of the knowledge base/level of Indigenous Peoples” is quite a demanding intellectual/scientific effort. As as example, the SW medicine men knew that in the year after a bumper crop of pinion nuts, a disease was more common - we know it as Hanta Virus.
Turns out the bumper crop of nuts led to a population explosion of rodents, and when the next year was back to normal level of pinion nut availability, the rodents came into the residential and food storage areas of the medicine man’s patients.
The rodent droppings carried the Hanta virus to the Indians when infected mice droppings contaminated food or possibly were dried, powdered under foot, and inhaled.
Question: Did they have a cure?
but I don’t believe the Bedouins “traditionally” had clue one about even the existence of diabetes let along how to treat it.
That is if they lived from being beheaded, stoned, stabbed, strangled, run over by a camel, poisoned by spoiled food, throat slit in their sleep by abused wife, murdered by someone that wanted what they had, or for being the wrong kind of muslim..
“Maybe used to alleviate some of the symptoms that diabetics presented — but I don’t believe the Bedouins “traditionally” had clue one about even the existence of diabetes let along how to treat it. “
The bedouins found that this relieved symptoms of something that ailed them. Was called whatever the bedouins called it. I don’t think a Bedouin said, “gee Achmed, that’s diabetes!”
I don’t know, a lot of ancient cultures knew something was wrong. They noticed that the urine was sweet of people with the disease.
Not sure I’d want to be the guy to discover that...