Abstract
Rural Paraguay presents interesting opportunities for investigating the subtle differences in the use of medicinal plants across seasons and the urban versus rural dichotomy in a local setting. This study investigates three aspects of plant-based medicinal use in rural Paraguay: 1) seasonal differences and 2) differences between urban and rural residents and 3) the source of medicinal plants used to treat thirteen common ailments. Interviews performed in January through March 2015 and repeated in June through August 2015 revealed small differences between seasons and between places of residence but a larger homogeneity in the two populations, a homogeneity that stems from the recent migration of urban residents from nearby rural communities. We also found that the important cultural and preventive medicinal use of plant-based additions to yerba mate contributes to the similarities between the urban and rural populations. The findings suggest the continued strength of medicinal plant use going into the near future.
Highlights
As plants and people migrate together across large physical and social distances, frequently to more urban settings, one would expect to find adaptation in plant-based medicine use to new and substantially different conditions
We found that the important cultural and preventive medicinal use of plant-based additions to yerba mate contributes to the similarities between the urban and rural populations
We found that plant-based medicines are incorporated in yerba mate as a preventive measure
Summary
As plants and people migrate together across large physical and social distances, frequently to more urban settings, one would expect to find adaptation in plant-based medicine use to new and substantially different conditions. Does this pattern hold when the physical and social distances are much more local? Community observation prior to initiating the study led us to believe that the number of individual cases of an ailment would increase for both urban and rural populations in the winter season. The easy and equal access to some pharmaceutical medicines, the recent increase in migration, the geographic proximity, and cultural importance of medicinal plants led us to believe that the populations would be more similar than different in their overall use of plant-based medicine
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