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Digitalis has been used to treat heart failure for more than 200 years. The drug digitoxin also belongs to this group of active ingredients known as cardiac glycosides. Although there were indications that digitalis was beneficial in heart failure, it has only now been scientifically proven that digitoxin has a significant positive effect in heart failure due to reduced pumping function and insufficient emptying of the left ventricle—known in medical terms as HFrEF (heart failure with reduced ejection fraction). For 10 years, researchers thoroughly investigated the safety and efficacy of the active ingredient in a clinical study involving more than...

Nicotine is bad for you and apparently it has the same poisonous effect on pests, getting scientists' attention for a potential alternative to traditional commercial pesticides. Tobacco and nicotine make one of the-hardest-to-get-rid-of vices of modern society – smoking, which can lead to lung cancer and early death. For hundreds of years now, tobacco leaves have been used on a small scale, as a natural organic pesticide, and as the growing concerns about health risk related to tobacco sales are harming tobacco farmers in some parts of the world, scientists looked for a new way of using this plant. Dr...