Americas · Amazon Basin Biomedical Students 5 September 2026

The Amazon basin holds extraordinary plant diversity and correspondingly deep indigenous pharmacological knowledge, developed across hundreds of distinct language groups. Several globally significant drugs trace to this knowledge. Curare, used as an arrow poison, led to tubocurarine and the neuromuscular blocking agents that made modern surgical anaesthesia practical. Cinchona bark from the Andean region yielded quinine, the first effective antimalarial. Pilocarpine, from Pilocarpus jaborandi, remains in use for glaucoma. Indigenous practice frequently involves complex multi-plant preparations and specific processing steps. Ayahuasca is the clearest example: it combines a DMT-containing plant with another supplying monoamine oxidase inhibitors, without which the DMT would be destroyed in the gut. Arriving at that combination represents genuine pharmacological insight. The benefit-sharing question is unresolved. Commercially valuable compounds have repeatedly been developed from indigenous knowledge with little or no return to source communities. The Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol establish frameworks for prior informed consent and equitable sharing, but enforcement is inconsistent. Deforestation compounds the loss. Species disappear before study, and the knowledge systems that identified their uses erode as communities are displaced and languages cease to be transmitted.

Native American Plant Medicine: Indigenous Healing of the Americas

An introduction to the rich diversity of indigenous healing traditions across North America, focusing on the plant medicines, …