| This thesis focuses on laypeople knowledge of medicinal plants and pharmaceuticals in a rural Mazatec indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico. In particular, it looks at intracultural variation of these two domains of medical knowledge, provides a case study to understand how knowledge of traditional and modern medicine are interacting with each other in pluralistic medical systems and whether these two categories offer a meaningful model for understanding medicine selection. The local ethnopharmacopoeias, emic concepts of illness, and epidemiology were documented through unstructured and structured interviews. Nutritional status of the study population was assessed by means of anthropometric measurements. A survey was conducted to test possible associations between knowledge of medicinal plants and knowledge of pharmaceuticals. Socio-economic and demographic variables were included in the model tested. We found that self-treatment is the most common first therapeutic choice. This is based on a pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants and CDMs that seem to be adapted to local epidemiology and explanatory models of diseases. Many of the plant species used by Mazatecs have recognized therapeutic properties. Likewise, people commonly use patent medicines that are effective in the treatment of the most common health conditions. However, we also documented the medicinal use of some toxic plant species and of some patent medicines that are held to be unsafe in developed countries. While our proxies for acculturation and market integration (Spanish and SchooHng) are positively correlated with knowledge and use of pharmaceuticals and negatively correlated with use of medicinal plants, we also found a positive and significant association, at an individual level, between knowledge of pharmaceuticals and knowledge of medicinal plants. This study suggests that in some cases empirical knowledge of herbal medicine and phannaceuticals can co-exist and complement each other because in laypersons' views these are actually part of one unified concept about healthcare. |
