Daniel E. Moerman

The importance of weeds in ethnopharmacology

Tropical primary forest is often considered to be the most important habitat for traditional peoples to gather medicinal plants. However, the role of weeds, commonly found in disturbed areas, in traditional medicinal floras has been overlooked. Data are presented showing the significant representation of weeds in the medicinal floras of the Highland Maya in Chiapas, Mexico and in the medicinal flora of Native North Americans as a whole. The frequency with which weeds appear in these pharmacopoeias is significantly larger (P<0.0001) than what would be predicted by the frequency of weed species in general. Explanations based on human ecology and biochemical ecology are presented.

An analysis of the food plants and drug plants of native North America

This paper compares the medicinal and food floras of the native peoples of North America. There is a surprising overlap of these floras by both family and taxon. Yet there are also substantial differences-food and medicine tend to involve different plant parts, plant habit, and plant character. The similarities and differences are considered in an evolutionary context and a theoretical perspective is suggested to account for these facts.

Edible Symbols: The Effectiveness of Placebos

PERHAPS T H E GREATEST single work that can be said to belong to the genre of medical anthropology is Levi-Strauss’s essay “The Sorcerer and his Magic” published in Structural Anthropology in 1963. The most interesting part of that essay is Levi-Strauss’s rendering of Boas’s story of Quesalid, a Kwakiutl Indian shaman. Quesalid, a skeptic of existential proportions, learns the ars magna of one of the great shamanistic schools of the Northwest coast: he learns how to hide the little ball of down in a corner of his mouth, how to bite his tongue in the proper place, how to suck at his patient, how to throw up the bloody down in such a way as to make it seem he has extracted the “pathological foreign body” from his stricken patient. Houdini-like, Quesalid will expose these fraudulent jugglers. And we watch him, in four short pages, learn the awesome truth: his fraudulent technique is magnificently successful. As Levi-Strauss tells us, by the end of Boas’s narrative, Quesalid “takes pride in his achievements, and warmly defends the technique of the bloody down against all rival schools. He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique which he has so disparaged at the beginning.”’ Levi-Strauss poses, but, in my opinion, does not solve, the problem of how fallacious technique can be successful. Given Western notions of causality, the problem is a terrible enigma. One of the most interesting problems for the medical anthropologist is trying to understand how placebos work. When physicians or other healers prescribe inert medications, by design or otherwise, we find that roughly 3 5 % or 40% of the time, the patient experiences a reduction in the severity of his illness, and in about the same proportion of cases (though not necessarily the same cases), the physician can detect an amelioration of disease. What kind of act is the prescription of a placebo? What does it mean that such an act can influence human physiological processes? How are we to think about effective but false technique?

Native Americans' choice of species for medicinal use is dependent on plant family: confirmation with meta-significance analysis.

We test the hypothesis that the choice by traditional people of species of plants for medicinal use does or does not depend on the families to which those species belong. Our geographic context is continental North America north of the Rio Grande River. Our plant context is flowering plants. Our ethnological context is Native American traditions. Our null hypothesis is that the probability of any species being medicinal is the fraction of all species that are medicinal, no matter the family to which that species may belong. Classical statistical techniques and the experience of ethnobiologists had already made it clear that among very large plant families, most have either very many or very few medicinal species. Here we use intense computation to simulate thousands of data sets to create predictions to compare with the observed data for medium and small families. Our results clearly show that a surprising number of medium and small families also have very many or very few medicinal species. Recent molecular, fossil and cytological studies have confirmed the evolutionary naturalness of most plant families. This suggests that species in the same family may have inherited from common ancestors similar ecological adaptations, such as ways to protect themselves from herbivores, pathogens or decomposers. Some of these adaptations affect the physiology of the attacking organisms, suggesting an explanation for the clear preferences of Native American traditions to choose medicinal species from some families much more than from others, regardless of the size of those families.

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.): A Neglected Panacea? A Review of Ethnobotany, Bioactivity, and Biomedical Research1

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.): A Neglected Panacea? A Review of Ethnobotany, Bioactivity, and Biomedical Research. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.) is one of the most widely used medicinal plants in the world, primarily for wounds, digestive problems, respiratory infections, and skin conditions, and secondarily, among other uses, for liver disease and as a mild sedative. Preclinical studies indicate that it may have anti-inflammatory, anti-ulcer, hepatoprotective, anxiolytic, and perhaps antipathogenic activities. Animal studies have also shown that yarrow is generally safe and well tolerated. The claim that yarrow has been shown to be specifically contraindicated during pregnancy is based on a single low-quality rat study the results of which were incorrectly interpreted. The combination of human use data from multiple cultures, independently reporting similar activities for yarrow, and the discovery of potentially relevant bioactivities by in vitro and animal studies represent meaningful evidence of the plant’s efficacy. We therefore argue that human clinical trials should be funded and conducted.

The Meaning Response and the Ethics of Avoiding Placebos

Because the “placebo effect” seems to result from “deception,” it is often disparaged and despised. Rethinking this and realizing that these benefits flow largely from the meaning of medical encounters (and are far better under-stood as “meaning responses”); realizing that there need be no deception to elicit them and that they are often very desirable, engaging fundamental human biological pathways, puts the ethical dilemma in a new light. It seems unethical to avoid—to evade—coming to a full understanding of how meaning can so profoundly improve human well-being.

The Meaning Response: Thinking about Placebos

It was July 21, 2006, early morning. I just checked the PubMed database for “Keyword = placebo,” and “Document type = Review.” A total of 10,062 articles. I have not read them all, of course; no one could. But I have read a lot of them, hundreds at least. Many of them have a common thread (note that my “single male” author in what follows is only for convenience; many of these articles have multiple authors, and I have never noticed any gender bias among them). It is usually apparent that the author has discovered this recently; he is quite surprised that there is significant evidence to show that people seem to respond, often quite dramatically, to inert treatment. He is a bit worried about it because he read Sissela Bok’s article from Scientific American while in medical school and he knows that this is really dangerous stuff, 1 maybe more dangerous than coumadin (which is, of course, in another life, rat poison). Now the trick in these reviews is to cram in as many studies as possible. It is never very clear whether the author has actually read the studies, but he has probably skimmed the abstracts. It is essential to include the famous one by Beecher, 2 to circle around Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche, 3 to mention Levine, Gordon, and Fields, 4

The medicinal flora of Majouri-Kirchi forests (Jammu and Kashmir State), India

The Udhampur district lies in the northernmost portion of India, approximately at 75” 7’ to 75” 10’ longitude east and 33” 54’ to 33” 57’ latitude north in the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The total area of the district is 2549 km2; it has a hilly topography ranging from 300 m to 2780 m above sea level. The region consists of limestone, quartzites, grit and earthy clay. The soil is sandy except in ravines and densely forested areas. The tract is extremely hilly, arduous and rugged. The flora of the district has recently been described by Swami and Gupta (1988a,b, 1989a,b) while the economically useful plants of the region have been described by Kapur (1990a,b).

Anthropological Studies in the American South: Review and Directions [and Comments and Review]

Although anthropological studies in the American South have been conducted in the past few decades, we find that there is a growth of interest in this region recently. Because of the decrease in funding for anthropological research in other countries, combined with the attitudes anthropologists are more frequently encountering from peoples in other cultures, anthropological research has increasingly focused on subcultures and regions in North America. The American South provides cultural variations and similarities amenable to traditional anthropological research, and research in this region increases yearly. The purpose of this paper is first to review briefly some of the approaches to the American South and to point out some of their advantages and disadvantages. Secondly, the paper will examine some of the recent anthropological studies in the region, focusing on the concepts they have employed to explain social change and continuity. Lastly, a direction for future research is suggested, utilizing a conceptual framework based on established anthropological approaches, that will, it is hoped, be used as a guideline for future sociocultural research.

An Open Letter to SEB Members, and Readers of Economic Botany, from the Editor in Chief

This has been a challenging and tumultuous year for your new editor. I have been on the job for about a year as I write this, and I am currently putting together issue 59(4). In the year or so since the SEB meetings in Canterbury where I was asked to do this job, I have learned a lot (some things that I think I might rather not have known) but I have also gotten to know some extremely interesting people—authors, reviewers, Associate Editors, Dan Austin (our book review editor), council members past and present (and probably future), and many others—who have enlivened my life, and given me a challenge that I never anticipated. I know that the journal has changed, and I anticipate that it will change more. I hope that the changes have been good ones. There have been several specific goals that I have sought to achieve after intensive discussions with the Council last year. We agreed that the journal had to return to its original size—roughly 400–450 pages per year—and that it had to become more analytic, more scientific, and less descriptive. Much of this derives from the the NSF conference held at the Missouri Botanical Garden in 2003 titled ‘‘Intellectual Imperatives in Ethnobiology.’’ That conference concluded among other things, that