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ETHNOMEDICINE AND ETHNOTHERAPEUTICS
Therapeutics is that branch of the medical science dealing with the treatment of disease and the term is used interchangeably with medicine, but distinguished from surgery or obstetrics.
As repeatedly emphasised in different contexts, the importance of plants in our lives, in addition to being a source of food, is their therapeutic potential. Every culture in the world developed its own practices of treating the diseased. The fund of knowledge developed over the millennia by thousands of ethnic groups, is largely unrecorded and faces the danger of becoming extinct. Our urgent concern is to preserve, refine and use this information for a more effective management of health.
While the basic emphasis in ethnic studies is on unrecorded information, often even well documented, but traditional systems such as Ayurveda, are also included under ethnomedicine. This may be in the interests of comprehensiveness, but goes against the grain of the basic concepts of ethnobiology and also loses the distinction between the well tested and documented systems of knowledge and the unrecorded.
Early in the human history, familiarity with plants capable of causing noticeable physical and psychological changes when taken in or applied to the human body, became associated with certain individuals, the ‘medicine men’ (or women). These "specialists" are usually the repositories of vast knowledge of plant properties, and gradually acquired great powers over the rest of the population, a characteristic that continues today in many primitive societies (Schultes and Reis, 1995). On the other hand, the general population (often the women) are also conversant with the medicinal use of their flora, an aspect that led to
the concept of ‘folk medicine’, in contrast to the largely magical and exorcistic practices of the medicine men and women. In many indigenous ethnic groups in the world, thus there are in effect, two systems of indigenous medicine. In the first system, psychoactive plants, considered to have a resident spirit and therefore to be sacred, are used to communicate with the spirit world via visions and other hallucinations. Failing a diagnosis through this medium, the medicine man or woman has recourse to prescribing medicinal plants. The second system of medical practice is based wholly on general familiarity with medicinal plants, knowledge amassed by experimentation over millennia and passed on orally from generation to generation (Schultes and Reis, 1995).In India, since Ayurveda was a well developed and recorded system, the highly literate Vaidyas with knowledge inherited either from the father or the teacher, took the lead in treating the sick, more particularly among the royalty, the gentry and the elite. By the power of a zealously guarded knowledge, and the social status of their clientele, the Vaidyas constituted the top tier of medical practice, and became a very influential component of the society, a status which the doctors of our time too enjoy. The folk medicine of the illiterate but very knowledgeable, took the second place while the magic medicine, the third tier, was confined only to certain pockets. Thus, in India, and possibly in China, there have been three tiers of indigenous medical practice, although in most parts only two of them (tiers one and two or two and three) coexist. When in desperation, one would try everything.
By all counts, ancient cultures throughout the world, nurtured till recent times, vast amounts of knowledge pertaining to the uses of their flora. This knowledge, of great potential value to humanity as a whole, appears to be doomed to extinction in many regions due to rapid acculturation and Westernization of indigenous peoples. The loss of this knowledge is especially detrimental to our efforts in seeking potentially valuable chemical constituents in the great number of species of unstudied plants, a major goal of ethnobotany and particularly ethnopharmacology.
Herbal medicine still occupies a very important place in the developing world. Exaggerated fake cures, and a severe abuse of herbal medical system that coincided with the development of sophisticated pharmaceutical chemical industry, have led to an almost total disappearance of herbal medicine in the United States, but there has been a considerable revival of interest during the past few decades. In some European nations, herbal medicine has retained some popularity, as evidenced by the Culpepper shops of UK and the Paracelsus shops in Switzerland (Schultes and Reis, 1995), and by some very popular books in Switzerland (Fluck, 1988) and UK (Mabey, 1998). Right at present, herbal medicine and cosmetics ride a new wave of popularity, throughout the world.
ETHNOPHARMACOLOGY
Pharmacology is the study of drugs and a drug is any substance with action on the physiology and psychology of the human system. In the current times, pharmacology is concerned with the physico-chemical nature, physiological action, target organs, therapeutic benefits, dosage and mode of administration, toxicity and side effects, and contra-indications of drugs.
To be internationally acceptable, drugs need to be subjected to a very rigorous pharmacological testing. The stringent drug testing procedures have human safety at heart and should scrupulously be adopted even though they impose heavy time and financial loads.
The rigour in drug testing emerged from the unfortunate experience with thalidomide, in the late 1950s to early 1960s. A seemingly innocuous drug developed to cure nausea and morning sickness in pregnant women, caused devastation of lives due to severe induced birth defects recorded in about 15,000 babies in some 48 countries. Thalidomide’s potential to cause genetic changes was not known till this happened.
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