Jungle, Our Healer Jungle, Our Healer
Wellbeing

Jungle, Our Healer

Botanical Medicine in the Americas
Maria Hawranek
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time 7 minutes

First, the botanico gave me a vegetable decoction, followed by a bottle of medicine made from a liana called viper’s tongue. The treatment turned out to be highly effective.

In February this year, I was in Panama. We were collecting material for a book about the Indigenous Naso community who live in the jungle in the Bocas del Toro region, in tropical thickets along the Teribe river.

I had a strange cold. All through the night, humid and noisy with cicadas, I was choking with a cough and burning with fever. I wanted to ask a shaman for help, but I’d heard that the last ones remaining lived along the upper course of the river, in an area we wouldn’t reach for a few more days. However, every settlement also has a botanico – a plant expert who, unlike a shaman, doesn’t cast spells or perform magic.

Boynic is a settlement of a dozen

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