Medical Ethnobiology Research Articles

Medical Ethnobiology and Indigenous Knowledge System Found In Darai Ethnic Group of Chitwan, Nepal

The present study focuses on traditional usages of animals and plants species for medicinal purpose and indigenous knowledge system existent in Darai ethnic group of Mangalpur VDC, Chitwan, Nepal. A total of 28 animal species and 76 plant species were found to be used by Darai people to treat 22 and 36 different ailments, respectively. Darai people have their own indigenous knowledge for making various bamboo products and fishing equipments and local drink (moat/muna). The existence of knowledge associated with animals and plants and their medicinal utility is currently threatened mainly due to modernization, easy access to health services, lack of interest of youngsters, few local healers and fading of ethnic characters of Darai ethnic group. Thus, documentation of such knowledge has become an urgent need.Journal of Institute of Science and TechnologyVolume 21, Issue 1, August 2016, page: 103-111

Teaching (With) Medical Ethnobiology: Indigenous Knowledge System Found In Raji People of Western Nepal

Teaching (With) Medical Ethnobiology: Indigenous Knowledge System Found In Raji People of Western Nepal

Medical Ethnobiology and Indigenous Knowledge System of the Lapcha of Fikkal VDC of Ilam, Nepal

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the medico-ethnobiological information along with indigenous knowledge system of Lapchas, one of the endangered indigenous nationalities of Nepal from Fikkal VDC of Ilam district. They were found to have rich and profound indigenous knowledge on the use of plants and animals for various purposes. Analysis of data revealed that local Lapcha people had a rich tradition on the usage of animal species and plant species of medicinal values for medicinal use for their primary health care services. Different medicinal plant and animal species were used for the treatment of different disease/ailments. The respiratory tract infections, gastrointestinal disorders, skeleto-muscular problems and dermatological infections were the most frequent ailments/diseases treated. The findings revealed by the present study have also been supported by the works previously done on other part of the country.Journal of Institute of Science and Technology, 2014, 19(2): 45-52

Medical Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacology in Latin America 2013

Medical Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacology in Latin America 2013

Recollections, reflections, and revelations: ethnobiologists and their “First Time” in the field

For nearly a century, ethnobiologists have collaborated with local community members in their efforts to document and safeguard our planet’s rich and varied biocultural heritage. Work in ethnobiology and ethnomedicine, including ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and ethnoecology, necessarily entails meticulous and rigorous systematic observation of the myriad ways indigenous and local communities cognize, utilize, and classify the floral and faunal resources on which they depend for survival. By its very nature, ethnobiology synthesizes humanism, ethnoscience, and empirical data collection and hypothesis-testing. Clearly, ethnographic and methodological flexibility are critical historically to the present and future successes of the programs we create and carry forth into the world. The practice of ethnobiology is itself inevitably capable of advancing pedagogies with real and lasting applications for students with only cursory knowledge of first-hand field experiences. Medical ethnobiology and ethnobotany, including ethnopharmacology, ethnoecology, conservation biology, and their related fields and approaches, are poised to evaluate carefully the richly and distinctly expressive component of our projects, wherever they are located geographically and situated culturally. Personal experiences, narratives, and reflections are occasionally minimized to varying degrees in the now-expansive body of ethnobiological and ethnomedical literature. Although notable exceptions certainly exist, our goal in the next months is to expand the scope of dialogue by turning attention to the most engaging forms of ethnography within ethnobiological accounts--that is, we seek to capture the stories, chronicles, imaginations, and memoirs of ethnnobiologists. Every few months the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine will begin to offer editorials drafted by several international ethnobiologists, who report their first-hand recollections of their earliest field experiences. These, we believe, are uniquely capable of rendering interpersonal interactions comprehensible and meaningful in vastly innovative, sometimes subtle, and often unexpected ways for students who are new to the field especially, and for intermediate and seasoned scholars with vested interests in the well-being of the communities they study. In introducing this novelty within the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, our goal is to ready readers for the array of voices, narratives, admissions, tribulations, engagements, and experiences of scholars whose works reveal how ethnobiological research is personalized and internalized, how friendships are forged, how emotions, responses, and senses are heightened in the process, and how casual and intimate field experiences coalesce and emerge through the lives and minds of scholars working early in their careers. Readers with established research programs in ethnomedicine and ethnobiology will find the essays provocative and revealing. Undergraduate and graduate students from various programs worldwide may find these recollections compelling, inspiring, illuminating, and encouraging. We also hope they speak to the curiosities and mysteries associated inextricably with “first time encounters” in field settings. In publishing this series of essays in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine we intend to provide readers a vibrant portrait of productive and rewarding learning journeys in the growing disciplines of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine.

The European Heritage of Folk Medicines and Medicinal Foods: Its Contribution to the CAMs of Tomorrow

Europe has shared a vibrant history in the use of herbal medicines since ancient times. Still today, it serves as a crucial hotspot for the production and utilization of herbal remedies. Despite the popularity of homemade and commercial herbal products in Europe, a key disconnect still exists in the dialog between allopathic practitioners and patients that use CAM herbal products. There is a pressing need to connect the evidence-based use of medicinal plants and their derivatives to emerging strategies of medicine and conceptual models of healing, which aim to be culturally sensitive in nature and take into account the cultural and historical backgrounds of patients. A key turning point in this challenge has come from the interdisciplinary science of medical ethnobiology, which addresses traditional/folk uses of plants and other remedies, in both rural and urban environments. In this special issue of five papers, our aim was to showcase some of the challenges and advancements made in this field as illustrated through case studies of medico-ethnobotanical research and recent findings in the study of folk phytopharmaceuticals, while also addressing some of the most crucial bottlenecks limiting their transition into clinical practice. The guiding paper of this special issue “Medical ethnobotany in Europe: from field ethnography to a more culturally sensitive evidence-based CAM?” provides a review of the medico-ethnobotanical field studies conducted in Europe over the past two decades, which have been focused primarily in the South and South-Eastern regions of rural Europe. This review demonstrates that such field studies represent an important foundation for understanding local small-scale uses of CAM natural products and allows for the assessment of how certain products could potentially be expanded into the global market. The article also delineates how field studies of this nature can provide useful information to the allopathic medical community as they seek to reconcile existing and emerging CAM therapies with conventional biomedicine. Some of the problems related to the status of traditional medical knowledge, which is at risk due to acculturation trends, are also addressed with the goal of fostering a sense of urgency to document and conserve knowledge concerning folk uses of medicinal plants. In the second article “Plant ethnoveterinary practices in two Pyrenean territories of Catalonia (Iberian Peninsula) and in two areas of the Balearic islands and comparison with ethnobotanical uses in human medicine,” the authors present the results of an ethnobotanical study focused on veterinary uses of plants in two Catalan Pyrenean and two Balearic regions, where approximately one hundred of plant taxa have been claimed to be useful for such purposes. A significant number of the plants discussed here have never been previously reported as medicinal. Moreover, the authors demonstrate how several ethnoveterinary applications coincide with those in human medicine, thus illustrating how a community's conceptual herbal landscape is the result of a complex ecological eco-evolution, where humans, animals, and plants are intricately linked. Likewise, a similar topic is assessed in the third paper “The relationship between plants used to sustain finches (Fringillidae) and uses for human medicine in Southeast Spain,” in which the authors describe their study of the complex interplay between local medicinal plants and plants traditionally used by wild bird hunters and breeders to capture and promote the captive breeding of songbirds in Southern Spain. A fourth article “Comparative medical ethnobotany of the senegalese community living in Turin (Northwestern Italy) and in Adeane (Southern Senegal)” serves as an example of a case study on migrant health strategies in Europe. Here, the authors describe a medico-ethnobotanical survey conducted among both healers and laypeople living in one Senegalese migrant community of Northern Italy as it compares to the ethnomedical practices of their peers living in Adeane (Southern Senegal). This study reports that the large majority of the medicinal plants recorded among Senegalese migrants were also used in their country of origin, thus demonstrating the resilience of home remedies among migrants in Europe. Importantly, the authors also discuss the potential role that such data could have in shaping public health policies devoted to migrant groups in Western Countries, which seek to seriously take into account culturally sensitive approaches in the form of emic health-seeking strategies. In the last article of the series “Can estragole in fennel seed decoctions really be considered a danger for human health? a fennel safety update,” the authors discuss their investigation of the safety of one of the most widely used European medicinal plants and flavoring agents in food products: fennel. The safety of herbal products is a top concern for their transition into mainstream use. Recently, due to reports of estragole carcinogenicity, fennel has been alleged to be dangerous for humans—especially if used as decoction for babies. In this paper, the authors challenge these allegations, pointing out that estragole is inactivated by many substances contained in the decoction.

Medical Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacology in Latin America

Medical Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacology in Latin America

The interface between medical anthropology and medical ethnobiology

Medical anthropology is concerned with both the causes and consequences of human sickness, and its various theoretical orientations can be grouped into four major approaches: medical ecology, critical medical anthropology, interpretative medical anthropology, and ethnomedicine. While medical anthropologists of all theoretical persuasions have examined why people get sick, the analysis and understanding of patterns of treatment has been largely confined to ethnomedicine. Historically, more emphasis has been placed on the personalistic or supernatural aspects of ethnomedical systems than on naturalistic or empirical components. While this focus has produced valuable insights into the role of ritual and belief in healing, it has led to the impression that traditional medicine is primarily symbolic. Moreover, it ignores the theoretical bases of traditional healing strategies and the practical means by which most of the world heals itself, namely plants. Recently there has been more interest in the empirical character of ethnomedical systems, and in this paper we consider the role that medical ethnobiology has played in this shift of focus. We begin with a brief history of medical anthropology to illuminate why naturalistic medicine was neglected for so long. We then review exemplary research in two areas of medical ethnobiology – ethnophysiology and medical ethnobotany – that address the study of naturalistic aspects of medical systems. We conclude with suggestions for future research at the interface between medical ethnobiology and medical anthropology that will contribute to both fields.

Introduction

This introduction to the volume argues for the central and integrating role of the subject matter of ethnobiological research in anthropology understood in its widest sense: in its biological, archaeo‐historical, and socio‐cultural dimensions. The background and current status of ethnobiology are assessed, and its contribution to anthropological issues considered under the following headings: the foundational paradigm of taxonomic orthodoxy; language and the translation of knowledge systems; cognition and culture; the social organization and transmission of knowledge; medical ethnobiology; the applied practice of ethnobiology; and – the meta‐theory which binds all this together – the co‐evolutionary paradigm as part of a wider ‘biocultural synthesis’. The way in which the collected papers exemplify these themes is discussed.

Some Field Methods in Medical Ethnobiology

The authors provide a summary of methods that they have used in their long-term interdisciplinary research that incorporates a series of semi-independent, complementary methods of data collection derived from medical anthropology, ethnobotany, and ethnopharmacology. Discussion begins with the first step in research with human subjects, the acquisition of prior informed consent; they then outline the theoretical postulates underlying their methodological approach. Medical anthropological methods include building databases of ethnoanatomical terms and named health conditions. Ethnoepidemiological surveys can then establish the perceived frequency and cultural salience of the health problems named in the databases. The ethnomedical and ethnobotanical data provide an ethnopharmacopoeia of medicinal plants that become the basis for documentation of the details of selection and preparation and administration or ethnoformulary. The results of these integrated disciplinary studies can be returned to the study population for home use, small-scale local production as cottage industries, and larger commercial production for sustained economic development.

NGOs and the process of prior informed consent in bioprospecting research: the Maya ICBG project in Chiapas, Mexico

In 1998, a 5‐year bioprospecting project that came to be known as the Maya ICBG was initiated among the Maya communities of the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The project was funded by agencies of the US government – the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Agriculture. Project personnel were drawn from a major US university, a federal Mexican research institution, a small British pharmaceutical company, and numerous Maya collaborators. The major aims of the research included drug discovery and pharmaceutical development, medical ethnobiology and floristic inventory, and conservation, sustained harvest, and economic growth. In spite of strong support from local Maya communities and Mexican federal agencies, the project was terminated in its second year due to the actions of local, national, and international non‐governmental organisations, which characterised the project as biopiracy. Major themes in the acrimonious debate that developed concerned the definition of prior informed consent (PIC), local communities' rights to grant PIC, and who should judge whether PIC had been obtained. In this paper, we describe the events leading to the termination of the Maya ICBG and question the motives and methods of certain NGOs in usurping the rights of local communities to act on their own behalf concerning the sustainable use of their own biological resources.

Three perspectives on the cultural construction of disease and healing

Fabrega, Horacio. Evolution of Sickness and Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xv + 364 pp. including appendix, references, and index. Kudlick, Catherine J. Cholera in Post‐Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California, xiv + 293 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00 cloth. Berlin, Elois Ann and Brent Berlin. Medical Ethnobiology of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The Gastrointestinal Diseases. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. xxxii + 557 pp. including glossary, references, and indices. $85 cloth.

Medical Ethnobiology of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The Gastrointestinal Diseases. and Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West

Medical Ethnobiology of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The Gastrointestinal Diseases. Elois Ann Berlin and Brent Berlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996 (cloth). xxxii. 557 pp.Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West. Margarita Artschwager Kay. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996 (paper). xvii. 315 pp.

Medical ethnobiology of the highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The gastrointestinal diseases.

Medical ethnobiology of the highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The gastrointestinal diseases.

Medical ethnobiology of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: the gastrointestinal diseases

Whereas most previous work on Maya healing has focused on ritual and symbolism, this book presents evidence that confirms the scientific foundations of traditional Maya medicine. Data drawn from analysis of the medical practices of two Mayan-speaking peoples, the Tzeltal and Tzotzil, reveal that they have developed a large number of herbal remedies based on a highly sophisticated understanding of the physiol-ogy and symptomatology of common diseases and on an in-depth knowledge of medicinal plants. Here Elois Ann Berlin and Brent Berlin, along with their many collaborators, provide detailed information on Maya disease classification, symptomatology, and treatment of the most significant health conditions affecting the Highland Maya, the gastrointestinal diseases. The authors base their work on broad-ranging comparative ethnomedical and ethnobotanical data collected over seven years of original field research. In describing the Mayas' understanding and treatment of gastrointestinal diseases, Berlin and Berlin show that the plants used as remedies are condition specific. Moreover, laboratory studies demonstrate that the most commonly agreed upon herbal remedies are potentially effective against the patho-genic agents underlying specific diseases and that they strongly affect the physiological processes associated with intestinal peristalsis. These findings suggest that the traditional Maya medical system is the result of long-term explicit empirical experimentation with the effects of herbal remedies on bodily function.

A Methodology for Cross-cultural Ethnomedical Research [and Comments and Reply

A Methodology for Cross-cultural Ethnomedical Research [and Comments and Reply