Setting up the drugstore

A Project looks to organize all the medicinal knowledge on herbs and plants of Piura Andes but from a scientific perspective. 

By Nelson Peñaherrera. Photos Courtesy by Fidel Torres. 

SULLANA, Peru 20101 – 1st Street, very near cars and vans stop those offer transportation service to Paita, is very known by who look for medicinal herbs. It is about almost a block where buyers nicknamed mystically have got an impressing market. Their advertisement guarantees healing based on ancestral knowledge, and, luckily, there are people who assure medicine is effective.

However, except municipal inspection to raise fees, it is not known if their products are supervised by Health authority that allows to determine if the cure is scientifically proven or its is just about ‘placebo effect’. In the other hand, there is not an official guide to determine which herbs are safe , which stores are safe or what persons are reliable to administer this kind of products. And speaking in official terms, perhaps the only place across Piura Department where safety and reliability are together is Reátegui Hospital, located in Piura City, managed by Peru’s social insurance, EsSalud.

This place is part of 36 centers implemented across the nation with Complementary Medicine area, in other words, a division specialized in recipe and offer natural cures or extracts without synthetic process. One of their promoters was former Peru’s President Ollanta Humala himself and the program was highlighted worldwide. The advantage is products are offered in a known place where you can claim if things go bad, the disadvantage is it only covers whom under an EsSalud vigent affiliation, that represents a minimum portion of the community. So what happens to the rest?

Doctors or shamans?
Essalud has involved in an articulated work with Ministry of Agriculture’s Agricultural Innovation National Programme, Mountain Institute, National University of Trujillo and two farmers’ unions who live in southeast of Ayabaca Province and north of Huancabamba Province. Among both geographic spaces (next to Ecuador) are located cloud forests and jalcas (pronounce ‘halkas’) or Piura’s páramo ecosystems, those are recognized because catch, gather and deal the water drunk by the entire Piura Department and surrounding regions. But what sometimes forgotten is its riches in botanic terms.

“It’s the big drugstore of Andean peasant,” Biologist Fidel Torres states, who is an old buddy of us and leader of project on behalf of Mountain Institute, which goal is disclosing what are Piura highlands’ medicinal plants and what is their healing potential - even what are correct doses and the best moment to extract them. So speculation is avoided and scientific standards are provided to an ancestral knowledge which has been passed mainly by oral mean through generations.

Work team vision is more doctors recipe totally or partially treatments based on medicinal plants replacing or complementing synthetic medicine. “Does it mean we’ll have doctors or shamans?,” one of FACTORTIERRA scientific editors asks. The reason is shamans or healers have been , traditionally, self-named oracles of that wisdom, which they mixed up with magic factors like the power of Piura’s Andean natural elements, especially Huaringas (pronounce ‘Wareenhas’) Lakes, the most famous ceremonial healing centers of this South American part.

“It’s a pretty place to visit but we can’t attribute it medicinal powers, considering the quantity of people who take a bath there, some perhaps diseased,” our editor adds. “Maybe it’s about suggestion.”

    Synergy and projections
Learning medicinal power of Piura’s Andean herbs lasted since 2016 until 2018. project was launched in Piura City, on April 15^th, 2016, with another one in parallel which will look to obtain a potato sexual seed resistant to warm weather. What makes this project different is the alliance of government entities, non-profit organizations and social unions. “It’s interesting now it is being funded more initiatives of this kind,” National University of Trujillo’s Professor Mayer Ganoza comments. He is promoting a post-grade on natural medicine some years ago. 

Many of the assigned funds to these projects come managed from National Council of science and Technology, CONCYTEC. Adding to medicinal contribution, Southeastern Ayabaca and Northern Huancabamba farmers are experiencing cosmetic potential of their vegetal resources, as they told to a Ministry of Environment’s TV show.

The strategy has no much magic but pretty progressive indeed: first all farmers’ knowledge is gathered, it is homologated under scientific standards those farmers also will work in, and all this systematized information is offered to Ayabaca and Huancabamba local governments and health stanss as well. Later, it will be enlarged to the rest of the country, being sensitive to local particularities.

And this is not the only place where this type of research could break out, literally. In Tambogrande, there are experiments about regenerative potential of overo flower (Cordia lutea) , that is medicinally used to treat kidney infections, even decreasing chemotherapies side effects. In a cosmetic level, overo soap promises to get slow skin aging. The point is there is not a valid scientific research which supports it, neither a sanitarian record. Turning this up, it may be included in any catalogue of products to offer the world, like the food & beverage import-export firm Pacific Trade International’s manager Francesco Navarrete expects.

With reports of Liliana Alzamora from Tambogrande. Thanks to Edward Valencia in Marcavelica for contributing us.
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