Leaves Of Life - - - Botanicals

Herbal medicine is now globally accepted as a valid alternative system of therapy. About 80% of people living in developing countries are almost completely dependent on traditional medical practices for their primary health care needs. Higher plants are known to be the main source of drug therapy in traditional medicine.[1] It is further claimed that 64% of the total population of the world utilizes plants as drugs, i.e. 3.2 billion people.[2] Approximately, 119 plant based derived chemical compounds of known structure and derived from ninety species of plants are currently used as drugs or as biodynamic agents that affect human health.[3]  

The doctrine of signatures further gives an examination of the ethnobotanical practices of these Obeah traditional healers and how they classify diseases and herbs. They have unique perspectives on the causes of diseases and how the human body functions. All this is interwoven into an underlying cognitive and symbolic system that holds together the diversity of the beliefs, techniques and practices.

Leaves of Life offers a holistic perspective on the time tested use of medicinal plants as practiced by Obeah healers and spiritualists, the renowned group of African centered, skilled healers and herbalists in Guyana.  Leaves of Life reveals the age old tradition of administering hundreds of medicinal plants to cure the sick.  Some ridicule them for their astrological beliefs such as insisting on harvesting their herbs at a certain time of day or a certain period of the moon.  But about eighty percent of the rural population in Guyana still depends on traditional healers such as the Obeah men and women for their knowledge of herbs.  Most of these herbal remedies sold in the local markets to people in search of cures, are nature's equivalent of aspirin, penicillin, quinine and others still yet to be discovered by modern medicine.  In applying myrtle leaves to a sore tooth, the Obeah healers are doing the same as a dentist applying eugenol oil to a sore tooth. In both cases, the toothache immediately disappears, writes Duke.[1]  It took a long time to learn the bitter principle from quinine bark can cure malaria and it would take even longer for medical research to show that the calcium consumed with coca leaves in Bolivia, or with betel in Burma might prevent or alleviate osteoporosis.