RAIN, RAINFORESTS, SHAMANS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

His next book, Plotkin says, is going to be about the search in the rainforest for a cure to cancer.

The subject is dear to him -- both subjects, really: cancer and the rainforest.

"I watched my father die of lymphoma," he says. "He died a miserable death."

And if Plotkin were diagnosed with cancer?

"I'd go right to the jungle in a heartbeat," he says.

The years he has spent with the shamans of the Amazon rainforest have taught him a profound respect for their work. He defines the term broadly: "A shaman is a man or a woman who combines different skills -- doctor, philosopher, singer of songs, keeper of legends, even the person who conveys souls to the underworld."

The plants in the jungle have yielded several important medicines, he says. And there are many more to be discovered.

"Western medicine is the most sophisticated system of healing ever devised," Plotkin says. "But it's got holes in it.

"Where's the cure for pancreatic cancer? Where's the cure for diabetes? Where's the cure for schizophrenia? For acid reflux? We don't have it.

"Some of these things, these guys may have the cure for them. They definitely have successful treatments."

The scientific community, he says, has trouble accepting shamanism.

"They think it's not scientific; it's an outdated worldview," he says. "I think of it as a parallel worldview," he says, "one which is internally coherent, makes a great deal of sense and allows us to explain phenomena we cannot understand otherwise."

Recently, Plotkin says, the research world has been more open to the possibilities of other medical approaches.

"When I was growing up, the thinking was that if we don't know it, it's unknowable," he says. "We're not such smarty-pants anymore.

"We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things we don't understand. Our system of medicine is just as puzzling to them as theirs is to us."

In fact, Plotkin says, about 80 percent of the people on Earth rely on plants for medicine.

"Not the drugstore, not the hospital, not the medicine chest," he says. "It's plants."

And they rely on shamans to deliver it. There is a basic difference, he says, between Western medicine and shamanic medicine.

"Western medicine is a combination of the chemical (what's in the medicines they give you) and the mechanical (surgery and things like that).

"Shamanic medicine combines the chemical with the spiritual. It's the whole mind/body thing."

While many people pit the two systems against each other, Plotkin is careful not to.

"I'm not one of those people who thinks the Indians have all the answers and the doctors have none," he says. "If I had a gunshot wound, I'd want to see a doctor. You don't want to go to an herbalist for a gunshot wound; you want a good trauma surgeon."

Every medical system that exists does something right or it wouldn't exist, he says. The Chinese medical system is 4,000 years old.

"If their medicine doesn't work," he says, "how come there are so many of them?"

http://blog.nola.com/elizabethmullener/2008/04/botanist_from_broadmoor_shares.html