Healers, folk

Garlic has received much use in the past by folk healers and there is continued interest in the medicinal use of garlic at the present time. 

Historically, plants and other living creatures have been used as medical treatments, and early chemically produced drugs were based on or identical to compounds extracted from natural sources. Nature continues to provide modern drugs, and searches stiU begin with systematic laboratory testing or by following clues from traditional folk healers. Modern chemical methods are used to improve upon what is foimd in nature. Some of these drugs, such as paclitaxel, provide major improvements in medical care. 

On the occasion of programs such as local healers conventions and village botanists workshops, local communities in village learned new skills of identification, herbarium preparation and new uses of medicinal plants. This has helped them in recognition of the importance of medicinal plant conservation and protection. Thus, GMCL contributed to a shift from a form of individual knowledge and awareness of resources conservation, mainly possessed by the folk healers, towards a form of collective knowledge and awareness of medicinal plant maintenance, more diffused at the wider community level. 

The Peruvian folk-healers ("curanderos") know the San Pedro properties... 

Folk healers prescribe kava everywhere the drink is consumed. Island pharmacists gather various parts of the plant, including the root, leaves, bark, stems, and their juices. Treatments include infusions and also poultices of leaf, stem, or root applied to the body. Observers have recorded uses of kava to treat a range of conditions. These include urogenital and menstrual problems, headaches and migraines, asthma and other respiratory problems, toothache, boils, sores and wounds, conjunctivitis, both diarrhea and constipation, earache, sore throat, sleeping difficulties, leprosy and other skin diseases, and more (Lebot etal., 1992 Kilham, 1996). Kava, occasionally, served also as an abortifacient (Riesenberg, 1968). 

The name Salvia is derived from the latin word salvare (healer). Salvia species have been used as folk medicine since ancient times in order to cure tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes coronary heart diseases, angina pectoris, myocardial infarction skin diseases such as psoriasis and eczama and have oestrogenic activity . 

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