Herbal knowledge of the Amazon

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. It stretches across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Hundreds of Indigenous peoples live there, each with its own language and its own knowledge of the forest.

People have lived here for at least ten thousand years. They also changed the forest: they grew cassava, palms and fruit trees and made fertile black earth, terra preta. In the western Amazon, in present-day Ecuador, cacao was used more than five thousand years ago.

After the arrival of the Europeans many people died from disease and violence. Around 1900 the rubber boom again took a heavy toll: in some areas whole peoples were forced into labour and massacred.

For many peoples of the Amazon, plants and animals are living beings with their own spirit or owner. Health depends on good relations with those beings, with other people and with the forest. Illness can arise when those relations are disturbed.

Healers, such as the pajé in Brazil or the curandero and vegetalista in Peru, learn to work with plants through long practice, often with strict rules of life and diets. The ideas differ greatly from people to people; there is no single Amazonian medicine.

Knowledge passes from parents to children and from healer to apprentice. Almost everyone knows plants for food, wounds, fever and stomach ache; healers know many more.

Much of what Western researchers know they learned from Indigenous guides. The American botanist Richard Evans Schultes worked for years with peoples in the Colombian Amazon from the 1940s onwards and described thousands of plant uses.

The knowledge is oral. What has been written down comes mainly from missionaries, travellers and researchers. A well-known work is The Healing Forest (1990) by Schultes and Robert Raffauf, on more than 1,500 useful plants of the north-western Amazon.

Some discoveries changed Western medicine. The arrow poison curare became the basis for muscle relaxants in surgery, and a remedy against diarrhoea was developed from the sap of sangre de drago. Since the Nagoya Protocol of 2010, countries must ensure that communities give consent and share in the benefits when their knowledge is used.

Indigenous territories are among the best-preserved parts of the forest. Communities protect the forest against logging, mining and agriculture, often at risk to their own lives.

Herbs from the Amazon are popular worldwide, as supplements or in cosmetics. That sometimes brings income to communities, but also leads to overharvesting and to use of knowledge without consent. In cities such as Iquitos, Manaus and Belém, markets sell hundreds of medicinal plants.

From the forest come resins, saps, bark, roots and seeds. They are drunk as decoctions, rubbed on the skin or taken with water.

The red sap of sangre de drago is spread on wounds and forms a protective layer. The oleoresin of copaiba is used for inflammation and wounds. Cat’s claw is a liana used for joint complaints. The seeds of guarana contain a lot of caffeine; the name comes from the language of the Sateré-Mawé.

People also use pau d’arco, catuaba, suma and ayapana.

For healers some plants are teachers. Ayahuasca is boiled with chacruna. Chiricaspi and sanango are taken during a diet, a period of seclusion with strict rules, to learn from the plant. From the resin of Virola peoples such as the Yanomami make a snuff.

Some plants from the Amazon are used in ceremonies, such as ayahuasca. They belong to specific peoples and healers. In the twentieth century churches also arose in Brazil that drink ayahuasca as a sacrament. Santo Daime was founded in Acre in the 1930s by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a grandson of enslaved people, who had come to the Amazon as a rubber tapper; the União do Vegetal in 1961 in Porto Velho by José Gabriel da Costa. In Brazil this religious use has been permitted since 1992, and in 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled in favour of the UDV. In the Netherlands the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that Santo Daime, too, may not serve the drink.

Ceremony tourism can be dangerous and puts communities under pressure. The cards of these plants list the risks; take them seriously.

Buy sustainably harvested products and, where possible, from cooperatives of Indigenous communities. And remember that behind every “discovered” plant are people who have known it for centuries.