Medicines from nature
Joanna Eede
Unless we protect the land rights of
tribal peoples, we will lose not only their vast knowledge of medicinal
plants from which many modern medicines come from, but also many cures
we have yet to discover.
Human beings have long depended on medicines from Nature to prevent
and treat illnesses, and today the World Health Organization (WHO)
estimates that up to 80 percent of the global population still relies on
plants for primary healthcare.
Medicinal plants are always used to treat illnesses
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For many of the 150 million tribal peoples, Nature provides a potent
pharmacy that they can rely on, thanks to their detailed botanical
knowledge; the upshot of a profound attunement to their ecosystems for
thousands of years.
For example, the Yanomami of the Amazon drink the juice of the woody
cat’s claw vine to relieve diarrhoea, and apply the bark of the copal
tree to treat eye infections. And the Shuar of Ecuador and Peru use no
less than 100 different species of plants solely for stomach ailments.
Another Peruvian tribe, the Matsigenka, rely on herbs stored in
water-filled pots to protect their babies. They think of many illnesses
as foul-smelling ‘odours’ or ‘vapours’ that have risen from the bowels
of the Earth, so, as anthropologist Glenn Shepard writes: “the fragrance
of Myrtaceae species and the ginger-like sedge root create an aromatic
force field around the child which keeps malodorous spirits at bay”.
Thousands of years of patient observation and experimentation are
evident too in the Innu people’s awareness that earache can be
successfully treated with the inner scrapings of beavers’ scrota.
“There are medicines out there that I know about,” said an Innu man.
“In the country I am an environmentalist and a biologist.”
In tribal communities the role of ‘biologist’ is often performed by
shamans: highly revered mediators between the living and the
supernatural worlds, they combine the diagnostic and curative power of
plants with spiritual healing.
A recent
analysis of the original sources for all 1,031 drugs approved
worldwide between 1981 and 2002 has concluded that none of these
could be traced unequivocally to a totally synthetic source. And
of the 300-plus compounds currently in phase 1, II and III
clinical trials for cancer treatments, only one was a true
discovery resulting from the laboratory alone. In other words,
the majority of medicines are still based on structures found in
Nature, and Nature still provides the best chemical leads for
biologically active compounds that have a medicinal value for
humans. |
They use the psychoactive properties of plants to induce altered
states of consciousness which allow them to commune with the spirits of
natural phenomena in order to determine the cause of their patients’
illnesses and ask advice on the appropriate treatment. “When for the
first time you sniff the powder from the y’k’anahi tree, the xapirip
spirits begin to gather around you. Gradually, they reveal themselves,”
says Davi Kopenawa, aYanomami shaman from Brazil.
For the Yali shamans of West Papua’s central highlands, certain
plants are so powerful that they are able to drive ghosts from villages
and rats from fields, and ensure the arrival of rain or the success of a
hunting trip. “The Yali excel as ecologists,” says William Milliken, an
ethnobotanist currently based at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew,
London. “One elder taught me about the magic plants of his world. So
secret and powerful were the plants, he sometimes only whispered their
names so as not to speak them aloud.”
It is the oral traditions of tribal societies that have trained
generations of shamans. Tribal languages are those of the land, suffused
with vocabularies that contain complex geographical, geological,
medicinal and climatic information. The Kallawaya, highland farmers and
travelling healers in Bolivia who have a vast knowledge of wild plants
and their therapeutic uses, have their own ‘secret’ language, called
Machaj Juyai, believed by some to be the language of the Inca kings.
Encoded within this tongue is medical knowledge that has been handed
down from father to son. Of the 7,000 languages in the world, however,
around 4,000 are now endangered. “Every language and culture shows us
something about the way a people has evolved to deal with the world,”
says linguist Daniel Everett. “So when a language dies, we lose ways of
life, solutions to problems and classifications of plants and animals.”
Were it not for the plant knowledge of tribal peoples, many vital
medicinal compounds might still be unknown. Certain plant products, used
initially as poisons by South American Indians, have become important in
Western medicine. One example is the poison curare.
Used on the tips of blowgun darts to render prey immobile, it has
been appropriated as a muscle relaxant for humans and has made possible
techniques such as open-heart surgery. As it is widely believed that the
medicinal value of many plant species is as yet unknown to Western
scientists, it makes sense to place greater value on the knowledge and
experience of peoples who have been studying their flora and fauna for
millennia.
Valuable as the botanical knowledge of tribal peoples is, perhaps
even more so is their holistic approach to health. Well-being is seen
not just as the absence of illness, but as a state of emotional,
physical and spiritual harmony. Man is not an island: humans are
dependent for their health on harmonious connections to each other and
to the Earth. “The environment is not separate from us,’ says Davi
Kopenawa. ‘We are inside it and it is inside us.”
This is a philosophy that takes into account the whole person, as
opposed to the more reductive approach of allopathic medicine, which
tends to consider an individual as composed of separate parts. As the
industrialised world becomes increasingly aware of the adverse physical
and mental effects of separation from Nature, one study has shown that
gall-bladder surgery patients who had views of Nature from their
hospital beds took less pain medication than those who had views of a
concrete wall, the need to integrate the genius of Western medicine with
the holistic understanding of tribal peoples becomes ever more urgent.
And with new pathogens threatening to cross the species divide, the hope
is that new medicinal plant compounds will be found.
Calanolide A, a unique chemical produced by the Bintangor tree deep
in the rainforests of Borneo, has recently been isolated; it may be
effective in inhibiting the proliferation of the HIV virus.
Coral reefs are also sources of medicines being developed to treat
cancer, arthritis and heart disease; a recent study by Australian
researchers suggests that coral produces compounds that act as a
sunscreen, which could be developed for human use. And a chemical called
kainic acid, found in Japan’s coral reefs, is being used to investigate
Huntington’s chorea. As the naturalist E.O. Wilson once wrote, “We do
not even know why we respond in a certain way to other organisms, and
need them in diverse ways so deeply.”
Ironically, just as Western medicine is beginning to re-discover the
value of natural remedies, so the world’s rainforests and coral reefs
are being destroyed and plants are becoming extinct. Botanic Gardens
Conservation International estimates that overharvesting and loss of
habitat threatens the survival of over 50,000 currently known medicinal
plant species.
As the habitats that are the richest in biodiversity tend to be those
still under the stewardship of tribal peoples (the Jarawa, for instance,
inhabit the last remaining tracts of virgin rainforest in the Andaman
Islands), it follows that the best way of protecting these precious
medicinal plants is to secure the land rights of their guardians, the
tribal communities.
As a child, I suffered from occasional warts on my thumb. These were
treated by my Welsh grandfather, an eminent eye surgeon. His technique
He cut an apple, rubbed the wart with one half and buried the other in a
sunny spot in the garden, just below the orchard. The wart would
disappear within days.
A placebo effect Perhaps. But isn’t this what the anthropologist Dan
Moerman refers to as the ‘meaning response’ the human mind responding
physiologically to curative manipulations that are meaningful to the
individual? These subtle and symbiotic powers of mind, body and Nature
are perhaps still far better understood by shamans and traditional
healers than by many ‘modern’ medical practitioners.
If we can find a painkiller from Ecuadorian frogs that is 200 times
as potent as morphine, if we can learn that there are anti-cancer
properties in aquatic invertebrates, we can only guess at what other
powerful natural panaceas lie within the tropical forests, in the depths
of the ocean, or in the icy reaches of the Arctic. And the ancient
languages of the world’s tribal peoples are no doubt laden with
knowledge invaluable for everyone. Third World Network Features.
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