Abstract
PlantMed is a new initiative to bring Amazonian medicine to people around the world. Describing the Amazon as a “living pharmacy,” PlantMed's mission is to bring indigenous healers from the Amazon regions and people from Western medicine together to “find new ways of healing and share it with the world,” according to their website. The website states, “The Shipibo people of Peru and the Sápara people of Ecuador have joined forces with scientists and entrepreneurs from the U.S. to build the world's first centers for the practice, research and preservation of Amazonian plant medicine.”
Luke Weil, a founder of PlantMed, chairman of Andina Acquisition Corp and chairman of Rios Nete, commented, “PlantMed is the non-profit umbrella fundraising organization to establish Amazonian medicine as a central pillar of medicine around the planet. Rios Nete, our clinic in Peru, will help us to practice, study and seek to preserve Amazonian medicine within a Western framework in the treatment of chronic illness. In this setting, we will have traditional Amazonian practitioners working in collaboration with Western doctors treating conditions such as autoimmune disease and other conditions. The second clinic, Naku, is in the Ecuadorian Amazon region. The Sápara are a vastly dwindled tribe in Ecuador, who will help us to focus on conditions such as insomnia and depression.”
Weil shared his story of traveling to the Amazon about five years ago to address personal medical issues for which Western Medicine had not been adequately effective. “While there, I saw people from places like Manhattan, New York being treated with no prior history of seeing alternative healers. I saw people treated with only plant medicine, and this was a paradigm shattering experience for me. I thought, ‘Well, either I'm crazy or this is a really big deal.’” Ultimately, Weil worked with the curanderos who had an idea of how significant this all was in the broader medicinal aspect on the planet. Eventually, Weil traveled to the Amazon together with a team who developed a fondness for the community and came to understand a bigger vision around Amazonian medicine.
Scheduled to open in the fall of 2017, Rios Nete, in Peru, will be a state-of-the-art facility, which brings together Shipibo healers and medical researchers to study and discover the potential of Amazonian plants to treat chronic illnesses that modern medicine has yet to cure. Naku is another healing center in Ecuador that gives the Sápara people an opportunity to share their culture and medicinal techniques with visitors from around the world—and preserve one million acres of pristine rainforest. Weil stated, “The third pillar of our plan is preservation of the Amazon. Younger generations have seemingly less interest in pursuing this path, and yet the jungle and civilization in this region are under assault. Our hope in creating a new value system, and demonstrating the Amazon's value, will hold intangible value for the West and play a role in arresting its destruction.” Weil referred to PlantMed as a highly ambitious project and hopes to be able to help many people. “We will start with 15 beds at Rios Nete, and people stay in residence up to several months and require a lot of attention and time from our practitioners. We expect much of the clientele to be international,” Weil said. “We also intend to provide treatment to local patients.”
Reid Carolin, a founder of PlantMed, film producer, director, and writer, commented, “While in the Amazon, we learned about the ancient body of medical knowledge that these ever-dwindling civilizations use to treat their sick and suffering. Impressed by both the massive scope and razor-sharp acuity of their wisdom, derived from thousands of years of working with medicinal plants, we left deeply eager to learn more.” Carolin witnessed first-hand the healing power of Amazonian medicine and quickly became energized to study and document these traditions. “We started PlantMed with the belief that sharing Amazonian medicine with the world could forge new pathways to cures for all types of chronic illness, and in turn reveal the jungle to be Earth's living pharmacy—far more valuable to grow than to destroy.”
John Paul Krueger, MD, PlantMed's current medical director, became involved and traveled to the Amazon as well. Krueger stated, “One of my colleagues recommended contacting PlantMed regarding a fascinating opportunity as medical director for a new clinic based in the upper Amazon outside of the Peruvian town of Tarapoto. The clinic there hopes to serve as both a healing retreat and ongoing educational center for the training of Amazonian healers while collaborating with conventional medicine to document outcomes, develop quality indicators, and perform ongoing observational studies.” During a November 2016 retreat, Krueger acquainted and immersed himself within the context of traditional medicine as practiced by the Shipibo tribe. He said, “Their healing system appears to have the amazing potential for providing comprehensive healing with the ideal resolution of chronic illness. My on-site role is to help facilitate each patient's healing experience as each individual embarks on a restoration of optimal health while monitoring for side effects.” Krueger's ongoing role is to develop strategic academic alliances for integrating Amazonian, conventional, and integrative medicine at the Peruvian clinic.
Initial Impressions of Healing Practices
The founders’ initial impressions when traveling to the Amazon and learning about the local healers way of practicing medicine centered around the ancient approach and unique types of plant medicines available. Krueger said, “Originally, I thought the strict diet the healers in Rios Nete prescribe would be difficult to maintain. I soon discovered, however, that with the right preparation, I had no difficulty transitioning to this diet. The patients had even less difficulty. Typically, the patients have already experienced minimal if any benefit from conventional or alternative modalities in their home country. They are here for the single-minded purpose of giving 110% in terms of belief and practice. With the plentiful supply of fresh vegetables, fruit, fish and other food provided, the diet is relatively simple to maintain. Broth without salt was an occasional humorous critique. Lime juice is often permitted as are vegetables or other fruits for flavoring. Marijuana and alcohol use are viewed as a direct barriers to healing and must be discontinued at the start of the retreat.”
Krueger was also intrigued by the evening treatment ceremonies. “I was struck with how simple and powerful Amazonian singing was as a mode of healing,” Krueger said. Receiving the tonal vibrations of the “ikaros,” or medicine melodies, has a way of vibrating and invigorating your body and spirit. Typically, after ceremony, a specific master plant or plants are prepared and activated for a patient. These plants are asked to partner with that patient for the express purpose of healing that individual's particular physical, emotional, and spiritual problems.
Krueger now works concurrently with the local healers, attending the evening treatments while also discussing their care separately as needed with a healer or patient. “I monitor the use of conventional pharmaceutical medications and supplements by patients,” Krueger said. He added, “The Amazonian practitioners recommend various plant medicines, which have been activated and are individually tailored for a particular patient. It is especially important to follow the individualized Amazonian diet to prevent improper application of the plant medicine and avoid potentially dangerous interactions. Typically, these plants are given as oral preparations, with modified diet recommendations as needed. Plant baths and Shipibo massage are also prescribed in conjunction with the plant prescriptions and the evening treatments.”
Carolin said his initial impressions in the Amazon were as a hopeful skeptic, which is how he tries to approach every new framework or idea he encounters. He commented, “I hoped that the wonderful stories these people told—both of the specific and very serious cases they treated, and their prevailing philosophy that every illness fundamentally has a cure derived from the natural world—were true, but I reserved personal judgment until I experienced the truth first-hand. Through that lens, I observed a system of medicine that was far more beautiful and relatable than I could have imagined, and over time I experienced and witnessed the curing of disorders I previously understood to be un-curable.” Carolin said that it was precisely this gap—between the knowledge he was taught to be true and his direct experience contradicting that knowledge—that inspired him to put Amazonian medicine under the Western scientific microscope. “We hope that PlantMed's attempt to bridge that gap equips practitioners and clinicians with more lenses to solve problems,” Carolin said.
Clinicians’ Need to Understand the Impact of Amazonian Medicine
The need for today's medical clinicians to understand more about Amazonian medicine lies within the bounds of understanding the importance of utilizing a range of integrative medicine and holistic approaches. Krueger commented, “Clinicians need to understand that Amazonian medicine treats maladies of the whole body, mind, and spirit. Long-standing complex illnesses whose origin lies outside of the current organ–system paradigm are well-suited for treatment by Amazonian practice. Amazonian medicine allows a reset of the operating system. These approaches add to our continued exploration of what is life, how it unfolds, and what perturbs it. These are ongoing research questions that cross specialties and fields, which have been the focus of physicians and philosophers for millennia.”
The founders of PlantMed hope that their work specifically inspires clinicians to study and understand the holistic models of the Amazon. “In Amazonian medicine, every illness is unique as opposed to broadly classified, and the symptoms are less important than the root cause,” Carolin said. He added, “Symptoms are generally viewed as the body's way of expressing illness as opposed to illness itself, so the focus of treatment is to discover and pluck the underlying roots and then harmoniously balance the entire system.” While there are various integrative medical systems that employ similar philosophical approaches, Carolin commented that he has found Amazonian medicine to be quite unique in its swiftness and efficacy in achieving results. He said, “We believe the reason for this is that Amazonian medicine relies on very strict medicinal-plant diets that have major and often immediate impacts on a patient's gut-biome and thus the entire system. Given that modern oncology and genetics seem to have trained their sights on the gut-biome, we find significance in Amazonian medicine's focus on the gut as a central pillar of healing.”
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As a writer, Carolin said he is naturally drawn to the power of the story of Amazonian medicine and stated, “That story—that ancient wisdom from the jungle could hold the keys to helping humanity defeat significant ailments—is as magical as a Hollywood blockbuster. We want to live in a world where it's true. But reality teaches us to dismiss such fairy tales as wishful thinking. What's important to us at PlantMed is that we allow ourselves to land squarely between the wish and the reality when we evaluate this story—to let its magical potential seduce us, but reserve judgment until we put it to our most ardent tests. Inconsistencies and contradictions will likely present themselves as we proceed, but they may also lead to radical answers we didn't even know we were looking for in the beginning. That's how the best stories unfold.”
Conclusion
With a solid foundation of funders and an impressive medical advisory board, Weil stated that PlantMed is well on its way to achieving its goals, and that Rios Nete is also the first Amazonian plant medicine clinic to be health certified by the Peruvian Ministry of Health. He said, “With the practice of this type of medicine we hope to be able to help many people, and through clinical trials, we will also study the efficacy of these plant methodologies, hopefully demonstrating their power to help heal people. We want to delve into the research behind the mechanism of action of these plants, which can be offered at an extremely low cost. The treatment will not be free for sustainability reasons, and we will endeavor to harmonize collaborative relationships. Amazonian medicine is a sacred science that may eventually be given the same amount of attention as Traditional Chinese Medicine or Ayurvedic medicine.”
Carolin pointed out that the Amazonian medical frameworks don't negate or discount Western ones. He said, “We believe that collaboration between the best that Western and Amazonian medical practitioners have to offer could yield extraordinarily powerful and even previously unimaginable results. The dream is to unearth an important body of lost-knowledge that belongs to the world, and to watch it disseminate and help heal chronically ill people everywhere. Should this story realize a vision that grand, the quality of our world and our existence in it would most certainly be inextricably improved.”
Finally, Krueger commented on his hopes for the initiative and said, “I hope that Rios Nete and PlantMed help to stimulate and facilitate a Renaissance of Shipibo and Amazonian culture. Instead of the de facto corporate exploitation and economic imperialism of the Amazon, we hope by proving the value of Amazonian healing in its traditional context as inherited through hundreds of years of practice, that the Amazonian people may be empowered to enhance their culture and way of life. The global impact of Amazonian medicine can only serve to enhance the inspiration of physicians and healers worldwide to learn, grow and enhance their own healing traditions with another sparkling facet of the healing arts as it continues to evolve.” ■