2024-03-04 11:22:13
Modern ethnopharmacology contributes to the “rehabilitation” of the misunderstood traditional healers, including the well-known vicodoctors, who operated in the region of Epirus utilizing the herbal medicinal wealth of the region.
Greece is an ideal place for highlighting active substances of medicinal plants, which are an important part of everyday pharmacology, while the further study of the folk healing tradition can also open new avenues.
In this direction, it takes place in Ioannina of 2The Panhellenic Conference of Ethnopharmacology entitled “From Vecodoctors to Modern Phytotherapy”, which opened with the speech of the invited researcher of Traditional Therapeutic Medicine of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University Alan Tweed.
Mr. Tweed’s research demonstrates the relationship of folk healers in Zagori, but also in many regions of Greece, with Hippocratic medicine, recording a series of plants used for everyday good health, not for specialized treatments. “Modern pharmacology does it and it should turn to the past, because it works”, noted Mr. Tweed in his statements, adding that – in everyday matters – plants provide therapeutic balance, that is, they do not cause other harm in order to cure something. “They are the perfect tool for everyday life, not for special cases of course”, he noted and added that Greece is ideal for this. “It is the ideal country to return to a simple way of life in harmony,” he stressed.
The prominence of tradition, which began to “fade out” with the development of Western medicine and the cessation of local healers, can to some extent come to light through the collaboration of historians of medical science and modern pharmacologists, as noted by Professor of History of Science at the Greek Academy of Sciences Petros Bouras Vallianatos.
“The most important thing to say is that we need to create collaborations between historians, who deal with the history of medicine, with scientists, who deal with plant research. This cooperation must be intensified and the conference helps us to get in touch with each other and to promote the study of plants and how the knowledge that existed and exists today in a limited way, we can use it for the discovery of medicines and alternative treatments”, he said, noting that there are still today written texts, medical treatises and treatises, which remain unpublished.
“The biggest challenge is how we can use today this knowledge that existed then,” he stressed, adding that there is a “gap” in the tradition that came from the Byzantine era, because Western medicine stopped folk healers in the villages, who but they brought knowledge from antiquity, refined of course through various processes and influences they received. “Unfortunately, today we have lost this oral tradition, which existed in the Greek area until the beginning of the 20u century, and we try to use the texts they have left behind, many of which are anecdotal. We have the medical books, we have the texts, and here in Epirus there are many, and we want historians to get involved and give the knowledge to the scientists”, he said.
At the beginning of the Conference, the governor of Epirus, Alexandros Kahrimanis, mentioned on the one hand the wealth of medicinal plants in the region, but also the support of the Region to the University with the aim of research and its promotion.