Herbal Medicine & Healing Traditions
Our work with traditional elders and healers springs from our recognition that there is much wisdom in indigenous cultures that has a direct bearing on health. There is much to learn from indigenous knowledge systems and the holders of ancient wisdom about living in harmony with our environment and with one another. There is plant medicine knowledge which is varied and sophisticated. There are stories which are morality tales, showing us how best to live alongside each other and how to respect the land and its other creatures. Africa and Asia still have many in tact indigenous cultures which remember these ways and bring them to bear on the problems of today. While HIV may be a new phenomenon, disease and stigma are not new. Traditional plant medicine approaches can be brought to bear on new conditions. Inherited systems for mediating conflict can be applied to today's unrest and social inequalities. We feel that it is wise to ask elders what they want to share, and it is good to listen to the wisdom and experience that they embody. Often we find that we can apply this wisdom to even the most basic public health problem or social ill.
When we say that we work to encourage the positive links between culture and health, we do not only mean traditional cultures, but we do include them. We recognize that there are many ways in which contemporary globalized culture shapes health, determines our sexual desires and proscribes our sexual rights, defines what is good medicine and who should dispense that medicine, defines gender roles, and largely determines who is secure and who is not. This "modern" culture determines much about our world. So, too, traditional healing systems and knowledge can be a wellspring of lessons we can use today. In approaches to plant medicine and nourishing foods, this is true. In many other aspects of social development, this is also true. Because TICAH is largely a health-focused organization, our learning and our emphasis is on health, broadly defined, and herbal medicine as a part of traditional healing. We recognize that herbal medicine is only one aspect of the rich array of traditional approaches to healing and health. We do not seek to lift this one aspect of traditional healing knowledge out of its rich context, but rather to recognize that context, acknowledge its roots and larger world view.
Our work on Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions is opportunistic and exploratory. We are sometimes asked to help document the plant medicine knowledge of a particular healer. We are at other times given an opportunity to see that a traditional healer is included in a policy or a panel that s/he would not normally be invited to be a part of. TICAH works to open doors that allow us to learn from indigenous and complementary medicines that have much to offer all of us working to improve health, while acknowledging its larger meanings and contexts. To do so is to improve our strategies for ensuring health and treating disease.