Two Aboriginal students won the first prize in this year's national scientific experiment contest but their discovery has been viewed by elders in their village as an act to subvert a hundred-year-old tribal tradition.
People of the Tsou tribe (鄒族) have long believed that toothache is caused by "caries worms" and when the worms are taken out of a decayed tooth, the pain will be relieved.
Suspicious of this age-old method, Wen Chia-hung (溫家宏) and Fang Pao-yu (方寶玉) of Hsinmei Primary School in Chiayi County conducted an experiment with caries worms, thereby becoming the first Aboriginal students in 43 years to win the first place in the national contest.
They first conducted a survey, which revealed that all the respondents between 30 and 50 years of age knew the tradition. Sixty percent of respondents had tried the cure and said their toothaches had disappeared after caries worms had fallen out of their mouths.
The two students followed the tribal custom of putting three different kinds of medicinal herbs into a pot of boiling water from which people with toothaches had the herbal steam directed into their mouths. The patients said their mouths felt numb and the pain disappeared. The two girls found small white worms of between 0.3cm and 0.5cm in length on the leaves in the pot, which the tribal elders claimed were caries worms.
After close inspection of the herbs, they found tiny light-green worms that would turn white after being put in boiling water, making them look exactly like the so-called "caries worms."
They therefore concluded that the caries worms are actually mere parasites on the leaves of the herbs and that the traditional method was effective merely because of the herbal steam that relieved pain and reduced inflammation.
Their achievement, however, has triggered a backlash from their Aboriginal elders, who argued that children's experiments could not be trusted and raised doubts about their research.
"Perhaps the herbs they used were not carefully washed before the experiment," said Yang Ching-hui (
Tang Pao-fu (
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