Word: shamanism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this stress has inspired corporations like AT&T and Boeing to recruit poets and other spiritual gurus to help managers cope creatively. "I teach people to find a special, still place inside themselves," purrs Richard Sandore, an obstetrician turned Andean shaman healer who founded a company called Soaring Spirit Inc. As a practitioner of "energy healing," Sandore works with Chicago-area businesses to tap the intuition and wholeness "that produced the works of Shakespeare and turned Microsoft into a billion-dollar giant within a decade...
...Shaman is beginning to prove the point, having identified more than 3,000 possible sources of new drugs while sampling about 100 plants each year. The company's first product, Provir, is an extract of plant material used to combat acute diarrhea in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Currently in Phase 2 clinical trials, it could be on the market in as little as three years. A topical ointment for herpes infection and an oral antifungal agent are also in the pipeline...
Whether the company will be successful remains to be seen. A healthy stock market has given Shaman a total value of more than $100 million and a two-year cash reserve, but the company is gambling on a drug-development tactic that hinges on the relief of disease symptoms rather than on causes--a method shunned by most drug companies. Critics say it is akin to using a cork to turn off a faucet without knowing how faucet knobs work. "There is an inherent risk," admits Conte. "But that lets us discover new ways that medicines can work because...
...company has 12 teams of physicians and ethnobotanists working year-round to establish relationships with native healers in 40 countries throughout Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. Skeptics, most of whom work for competing drug companies, suggest that Shaman cannot depend on primitive healers, who are seen as a cross between country doctors and clerics...
That may, however, be a matter of cultural interpretation. Shaman's ethnobotanists have found that many rainforest healers actually live with their patients to witness firsthand the full range of medical symptoms. "That," says Conte, "is much more sophisticated healing than what we do here...