Newsline for Pharmacists, February 1995
PHARMACY FROM THE RAINFOREST
by Dan Wagner
In October 1994, I had the distinct privilege of joining the first international team of health professionals organized to take part in an 8-day expedition to the vast and pristine rainforest in one of the earth's most biologically diverse ecosystems, the Upper Amazon Basin in Northern Peru. The trip was entitled "Pharmacy from the Rainforest," and was a precedent-setting field workshop placing the participants on the cutting edge of innovative breakthroughs in plant drugs, medical botany, phytomedicinals, ethnobotanical research, and rainforest ecology in the Amazon Basin.
This unique Amazon adventure was sponsored by the Texas Pharmacy Foundation, the American Botanical Council and International Expeditions, Inc. A group of pharmacists, botanists, herbalists, educators, journalists and other health professionals joined in a concerted effort to acquire knowledge of tropical rainforest medicines in the hopes of strengthening the vital link between natural drug products and modern medicines.
A four-hour plane ride from Miami, on Faucett Airlines of Peru, took us to the Amazon port city of Iquitos. Iquitos is a jungle city that is inaccessible by highways or roads. Its isolation has been a blessing to this small, but bustling city of about 300,000 people. Since the area is inaccessible by trucks and the cost of transporting logs by boat is expensive, the forest area around Iquitos has remained a vast ocean of green, virtually free from loggers.
A Tour of the Forest
We spent our first three days at the Explorama Lodge learning more about the diverse rainforest ecosystem. The workshops and field excursions conducted at the Lodge were excellent. An eminent faculty of leading naturalists, educators, and top research scientists made the midmorning and late-afternoon educational programs top-notch in every way. Our workshop subjects were well organized and varied, and included such topics as "Nutrition and the Amazon Food Pharmacy," "Pharmacology and the Therapeutic Application of Plant Drugs," "Tropical Medicines in the Rainforest Environment," "From Curare to Cures: Pharmacy From Powerful Plants," and "Ethnomedical Field Research in the Amazon - Promising New Drug Leads." These programs allowed us to gain insight and understanding into subjects that would not have been possible in the traditional classroom environment.
Personally, I learned a great deal about alternative medicines from plants. Learning about which trees, roots, flowers, fruits, and other parts of the plant are used in the effective treatment of diseases is exciting and rewarding knowledge. It reminded me that 20-25% of the drugs pharmacists dispense daily in modem pharmacies are still either totally or partially extracted from natural source modalities, many of which came from the rainforest. This was an obvious link to my own practice as a community pharmacist.
The vegetative communities of the Amazon are complex, little known, and poorly defined. I had the opportunity to view the forest from the air. Appearing as a sea of green from above, closer inspection shows that the Amazon is broken down into a multitude of tree, plant, and animal species. The dense swamp forest is dramatically characterized by a large variety of trees. No one species dominates. In fact, I was astonished to learn that there are more types of trees (at least nine inches in diameter) in one hectare of Peruvian rainforest (about 2.5 acres) than exists in all of the United States and Canada combined.
The amount of wildlife in the Amazon rainforest is not as overly abundant as one might be led to believe. Certainly insects and birds abound, but actually glimpsing mammals, reptiles or amphibians is a rare treat. Night excursions proved to be fruitful for seeing native species. At night a small group of us would take a motorboat up the narrow waterway along the Napo River. Our guide, Julio, would stand in front of the boat holding a flashlight and astoundingly pick out an array of night creatures along the river bank. We saw a tree iguana sleeping on an extended branch, a most striking anuran (poison tree frog) sitting in the mud, and a huge Ringed Kingfisher peering from a nearby tree.
The rivers teem with piranha. The piranha actually get spooked by the sound of the boat's motor and fly 3 or 4 feet into the air. Two fish actually jumped right into our boat! Their razor-sharp teeth are quite evident, and I was told they are a favorite food for the local Chamas, Riberenos and Yagua Indian tribes.
One day, a giant, 4-foot black and gold Tegu lizard wandered into camp. A guide picked it up, and we all took turns getting our picture taken while holding the giant reptile that is sometimes called the "alligator lizard." I was also able to witness a large family of black Spider monkeys and a smaller pack of Brown-headed Tamarins, a larger relative of the Marmoset.
The ACEER (Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research) is a ecotourism facility that is encircled by 250,000 acres of primary rainforest in Northeastern Peru in an area designated as the Amazon Biosphere Reserve. The ACEER is a small but comfortable lodge that can sleep up to thirty.
The ACEER is the only place in the Western Hemisphere with a treetop walkway that allows participants to explore the formerly inaccessible area at the top of the Amazon rainforest. The famous canopy walkway is a footpath suspended among the trees with both ropes and cable supports. The walkway extends over the delicate green shadow of the forest and disturbs very little of the natural world above or below the trees. Constructed at the tip of the forest's canopy, the walkway extends 1,200 feet and reaches a top height of nearly 120 feet above the jungle floor.
The Medicine Men
The medicine men and women of the rainforest are often called shamans, bruhas, or witchdoctors. For thousands of years these healers, from hundreds of Amazonian tribes, have been searching the rainforest in search of plants, roots, herbs, fruit, leaves, and trees that provide powerful drugs largely unknown and/or misunderstood by Western doctors and scientists.
In one workshop retreat, headed by internationally known ethnobotanist, Dr. Mark Plotkin, our small group had the privilege of meeting an authentic medicine man named Don Antonio Pisco from the local Riberenos tribe. We traveled from camp about two miles into the forest to his secret jungle ceremonial site (or shaman's curing grounds). Don Antonio was a shaman particularly skilled in administering one powerful drug/plant called "ayahuasca." This drug is a potent hallucinogen that is used to summon spirits in certain healing rituals. He shared some of his profound knowledge of plant drugs and encouraged us to ask questions about his ritual practices.
The Search For New Medicines
With the magic and the wonder of the rainforest dazzling our eyes, it was easy to be distracted from the main reason our team made such a long journey to the Amazon - to search for new and therapeutic medicines from the rainforest.
Of the 35,000 to 80,000 species of higher plants estimated to grow in Amazonia, only a tiny fraction have been investigated for their medical or chemical properties.
Some of the more interesting plants that our team encountered were located on a pathway near the ACEER area called "The Useful Plant Trail." Here we studied such plants and herbs as the 'Remo Caspi,' a tree, in which a milk-like sap or latex is used as an effective treatment of leprosy; the "Jergon Sacha" herb used for snakebites; the "Azucar huagyo," a tasty, edible fruit, whose bark is steeped in alcohol and taken as a cure for arthritis, rheumatism and worms; the "Canagre" herb of the ginger family, whose juice is mixed with lemon or orange juice as a remedy for a sore throat, laryngitis or whooping cough; the "Pichirina" tree of the St. Johns wort family, in which the orange latex is applied to ringworm and other fungal infection; and a shrub of the black pepper family called "Cordoncillo," used by the Orejones Indians to coat their teeth to prevent cavities.
There are hundreds of other plants and trees that are extremely useful to the indigenous people of the region. Many of the illnesses that they treat such as severe fungal infections of the skin, herpes sores, lung disease, bad cuts and bruises, rheumatism, and various venereal diseases, are still not sufficiently treated and cured by modem drugs with which we are familiar. Yet, in many instances their medicines seem to suffice.
Dr. Plotkin states, "We have a lot to learn from these people. When a shaman dies it is like a great library burning to the ground. All his knowledge is rarely written down and recorded, and if he dies without an able apprentice, this knowledge is lost forever."
With the erosion of world's tropical rainforests and the pressures on the indigenous cultures to survive, it is a race against the clock to preserve the biological and cultural diversity that remains in the vast Amazon rainforest.
In the last thirty years, drug companies have shied away from investigation into natural products and have concentrated their new drugs on synthetics made in the laboratory. There is a general feeling among many pharmocognosists that there may be a real movement back to the world's greatest pharmacy laboratory - the rainforest. The key question remains: "Is it affordable and profitable?"
Researchers and medical scientists who know the indigenous people and their medicine men have a distinct advantage in increasing the chances of finding a natural-source drug. The shaman can become a deciding factor in increasing the odds of finding a plant that could produce a major drug modality for use in human disease. And the ethnobotanist is the best prepared professional who can mediate between the pharmaceutical manufacturer and the indigenous people. I would someday cherish the opportunity to work in this capacity - finding new drugs in a mutual symbiotic effort between the needs of the drug manufacturer and the needs of the rainforest and its people.
About the author
Dan Wagner is the pharmacist/owner of MediPharmacy in Allison Park, PA, just north of Pittsburgh and an adjunct-professor of pharmacy management at Duquesne University School of Pharmacy in Pittsburgh.
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