Plotkin has raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment – and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest.įor more than a decade, Dr. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet – as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness.
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