Undergraduates to study medicinal plants, culture of healing in Peru

UB undergraduate students will travel to northern Peru next summer to conduct rigorous interdisciplinary research into the biological and chemical properties of indigenous medicinal plants and study ways in which the plants are employed by the curanderos — the region’s native healers — as well as the cultural meanings attached to these practices.

This collaborative effort involving anthropologists, natural products chemists, ethnobotanists and physicians in the U.S. and Peru is is funded by an undergraduate Minority Health International Research Training (MHIRT) grant from the National Institutes of Health to San Diego State University (SDSU).

MHIRT involvement in Peru began 11 years ago through the collaboration of ethnobotanist Rainer Bussmann, director of the William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Douglas Sharon, now an adjunct professor of anthropology at UB and at SDSU.

Gail Willsky, associate professor of biochemistry in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, became involved three years ago when microbiology and chemistry laboratory work became a more important part of the project  Her students previously have participated in that aspect of the research.

This year’s research will consist of two interrelated studies in anthropology and laboratory analysis co-directed by Willsky and Sharon.

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, UB College of Arts and Sciences, will coordinate the anthropology portion of the project at UB.

Willsky, a biochemist whose research areas include the anti-diabetic properties of metal-containing compounds, says she will work with students “to conduct research into the anti-bacterial properties and toxicology of extracts of medicinal plant and plant mixtures used by Peruvian healers to treat infectious diseases. They also will learn to identify and collect plants and to prepare extracts for analysis.”

These “wet bench” laboratory studies — so called because the chemistry generally is conducted in the liquid phase at lab bench — will take place in the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo in Trujillo, Peru.

John Crane, an expert in infectious diseases and associate professor in the Department of Medicine in the UB medical school, will serve as a consultant to the project.

The anthropological side of the project will be led by Sharon, whose work includes extensive research into curanderism and medicinal plant use on the northern coast of Peru. He is the author of “The Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shaman’s Story,” about the mestizo curanderism of the late Eduardo Calderon (Sharon now works with Calderon’s daughter, Julia, also a curandera) and “Shamanism and the Sacred Cactus,” a study of the use of the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus by Peruvian shamans.

Bacigalupo, who will coordinate the anthropology project at UB, has for decades investigated and published on indigenous shamanic healing practices among the Mapuche people of Chile.  She is the author of “The Voice of the Drum in Modernity: Tradition and Change in the Healing Therapies of Seven Mapuche Shamans” and “Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among Chilean Mapuche.”

“The project’s anthropology research,” she says, “will address several areas: the cultural meanings and curanderos’ uses of medicinal herbs and herbal mixtures; the collaboration between practitioners of modern medicine and the curanderos in the fields of phytotherapy, ethnobotany, pharmacy and psychology; patients’ health care- seeking behaviors and how they navigate traditional versus biomedical health care systems; and the impacts of traditional medicine and ethnobotany on the improvement of health care in Trujillo.”

This work, says Bacigalupo, will be conducted at the homes of curanderos and at the Centro de Atención en Medicina Complementaria (CAMEC)-EsSalud in Trujillo, a center for complementary medicine, as well as at the highland gardens of medicinal herbs in Huamachuco, on the Andean cordillera.

Additional direction will be provided by medical anthropologist Linda Kahn, research associate professor and National Research Service Award fellow in the Department of Family Medicine in the UB medical school.

Willsky’s lab previously identified 16 two-plant mixtures used by Peruvian curanderos specifically to treat infectious disease. Seven of these mixtures were studied in 2012 and 2013, and the 2014 summer project will continue that work.