National Geographic
When Grace Gobbo walks through a Tanzanian rain forest, she doesn't see only trees, flowers, and vines. She sees cures.For
centuries, medicinal plants used by traditional healers have been at
the heart of effective health care in this verdant African nation. With
expensive imported pharmaceuticals unaffordable for most of the
population, holistic cures often provide the only relief for illness.
But today, both the lush landscape and indigenous medical knowledge are
disappearing. Gobbo hopes her efforts to preserve natural remedies and
native habitat will help reverse the trend.Gobbo works as an
ethnobotanist with the Jane Goodall Institute's Greater Gombe Ecosystems
Program, but her specific interest in medicinal plants bloomed late.
Growing up in a Christian family with a doctor for a father, Gobbo
dismissed traditional healing as witchcraft. Then coursework in botany
exposed her to evidence she couldn't ignore. "We studied cases where a
particular plant successfully treated coughs," she recalls. "Laboratory
results proved it stopped bacterial infection."
Intrigued, Gobbo
began interviewing traditional healers in her own area who described
their success using plants to treat a wide range of ailments, including
skin and chest infections, stomach ulcers, diabetes, heart disease,
mental illness, and even cancer. To date, she has recorded information
shared by more than 80 healers, entering notes and photographs about
plants and their uses into a computer database.
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