ASocio-EconomicPerspectiveofMedicinalPlantsInSt.Lucia摘要.docVIP

A Socio-Economic Perspective of Medicinal Plants In St. Lucia Herbal Medicine Group Megan O’Melia Dani Fuoco Karuna Jobanpurta Turmeric from the Forestry Department’s herb garden Introduction Western Medicine and Traditional Medicine are synergistically related. Western pharmaceutical companies create synthetic drugs based on traditional knowledge, flora and fauna from the tropics, yet these resources are being lost. Habitat and biodiversity are becoming scarce ‘commodities’ and traditional medicinal knowledge is slipping through the generation gap. Western Medicine’s ideology of healing, extracts a constituent from a plant and creates a synthetic drug marketing it to the mass public reaping profits with sometimes very little or no benefits to the local community. The overall nature and culture of medicine has transitioned from preventing the problem before it occurs to administering a drug for an immediate solution. With naturopathy and homeopathy, these ideas of healing are progressively integrated not only into people’s diets but also their lifestyles. In places with ancestral knowledge regarding medicinal plant uses, it is not uncommon for one to pluck the leaf of a plant and create a tea in order to alleviate an illness. Yet this ideology of healing is threatened? as deforestation and degradation prevail, and urban areas continually expand. Traditional knowledge is also lost as western pharmaceutical drugs replace the folk knowledge and remedies. Western cultural influences also deter the interest of the younger generation and question the belief system of traditional medicine because it lacks scientific testing. The relationship in the western world between patient and doctor differs greatly from the relationship which occurs in an older culture of folk knowledge. In this culture the traditional healer knows the patient individually and assesses his or her problems in a holistic sense rather than prescribing a pharmaceutical drug to alleviate an a