Word: cures
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...patients. With the knowledge passed down from his father, Dan built himself a thriving practice in Ho Chi Minh City, eventually accumulating some $75,000. But one question continued to nag him about his brother's and father's deaths: "Why didn't they find a medicine to cure themselves...
...then set out on a cross-Vietnam journey with a single goal: to find a cure for opium addiction. He collected more than 100 herbal potions that villagers substituted for opium when their poppy crops failed and their supplies dwindled. Eventually, he decided on a drastic step: to addict himself to opium and experiment on himself. "I knew from my brother how dangerous this could be," he says, "but I decided this was the only...
Salome is explaining a traditional cure for pterygium, an eye affliction common to the tropics in which vision gradually becomes obscured as a layer of tissue encroaches over the cornea. The traditional cure used by healers is leaves of Centella asiatica, a ground-hugging vine, which Salome chews into a poultice, smears on a cloth and then places as a compress on the afflicted eye for three consecutive nights...
...before this can be done, Salome explains, there is another crucial part of the cure. Holding a coconut-shell bowl containing ashes, she flicks them in the direction of Cox, who is playing the patient. When he soberly asks why the ashes are necessary, she replies that they enhance "spiritual transmission" between healer and patient. "We Westerners have to suspend judgment at these times," says Cox. "Look at our own belief in doctors wearing white coats. In Western culture that uniform is comparable to the 'spiritual transmission' she sees...
...locating plants that have medical potential. "Indigenous people have been testing plants on people for thousands of years," says Cox. More important, healers may alert ethnobotanists to nuances that random collecting could miss. Take Homalanthus nutans, a rain-forest tree whose bark Samoans have used for centuries as a cure for hepatitis. Cox quickly found that he could not just casually go into the forest and gather the bark because 1) there are two varieties of the tree, and the bark of only one is effective, and 2) only trees of a certain size produce the desired extract...