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Kala CP. Aboriginal uses and management of ethnobotanical species in deciduous forests of Chhattisgarh state in India. J Ethnobiol Ethnomed. 2009 Aug 4;5:20. PMID: 19653889; PMCID: PMC2729299.

Chandra Prakash Kala of the Indian Institute of Forest Management reports on a comprehensive ethnobotanical survey of rural Surguja, a biodiverse region of rich deciduous forests in the Chhattisgarh state of central India. 

The people of this region have developed herbal remedies over centuries, perhaps millennia, for a number of tropical maladies. Here’s one extract from the article, in which Kala discusses plant products used for cobra bites, scorpion stings, and mosquito protection:

"Many species of snakes including cobra were found in the study area, and snakebite was one of the frequent problems. In case of snakebite, the person was treated by some specialized expert, who used some plant species and also chanted some spiritual words while curing snakebite. Diospyrus melanoxylon Roxb., Elaeodendron glaucum Pers., and Garura pinnata were some of the important plant species used for curing snakebite. Similarly, the scorpion bite was treated by using the leaf paste of Achyranthus aspera L., and tuber of Urginea indica Kunth. The Surguja district is a mosquito prone area, and death by malarial fever is a common phenomena. The local people spend most of the time in the forest for rearing of their livestock, collection of fuelwood, fodder, medicinal and edible plants. To keep mosquito away from their body, they rubbed leaves of Chloroxylon swietenia DC. on the exposed body parts and also put its twigs on the head and back."

Kala documents 73 ethnobotanical species used as medicines, food, tonics, dyes, beverages, fish poisons, and mosquito repellent. She also proposes screening and standardizing compounds according to medicinal potency and nutritive values, and developing sustainable harvesting and production practices that make fair-trade use of local resources and knowledge rather than exporting plant products in raw forms. [Read the article.]

CAMWatch: Posts about free-access, peer-reviewed articles on aspects of complementary medicine theory, practice and policy (about the blogger).This blog is not a source for medical advice.

technorati tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine malaria conservation

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Mahawar MM, Jaroli DP. Traditional zootherapeutic studies in India: a review. J Ethnobiol Ethnomed. 2008 Jul 18;4:17. Review. PMID: 18634551

Filling a significant gap in published literature about animal-derived traditional medicines, the authors gathered data from 15 zootherapeutic studies published in India from 2000 to 2007. The resulting review article catalogs, by condition, 207 therapeutic applications of 109 animals in traditional medicine throughout India.

"In India, since times immemorial, great work was done in this field and documented in works like Ayurveda and charaka Samhita. Additionally immense knowledge has come down to modern times through folklore as various practices became a part of tradition amongst various groups. We can find that people still use various animal products and by-products for cure of various diseases. For example, honey is used as expectorant, cattle urine has been used as a therapeutic. All this knowledge has once again come to the limelight, as there has been a sort of disillusionment with the current allopathic cure, as it has got its own side effect and in fact has no cure for various diseases. Therefore people are looking for traditional remedies for the treatment of ailments. But in India this traditional knowledge is fast eroding due to modernization. Thus there is an urgent need to inventorise and record all ethnobiological information among the different ethnic communities before the traditional cultures are completely lost."

 

CAMWatch: Posts about free-access, peer-reviewed articles on aspects of complementary medicine theory, practice and policy (about the blogger). This blog is not a source for medical advice.

technorati tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine ethnobiology ayurveda

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My new favorite yoga instructor had our class run through our hatha series blindfolded, which led me to think about the faculties of proprioception and kinesthesia - our sense of our bodies in space.

First, from Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz’s You: The Owner’s Manual:

"Try this self-test: Stand on one leg and close your eyes. The longer you can stand without falling, the younger your brain (fifteen seconds is very good if you are forty-five or older). That balancing act is just one sign of your brain strength. To develop better balance, you should use free weights - that is, dumbbells and barbells - because exercising with them works your proprioception (your ability to balance). Weight machines don’t have the same effect because the weights are attached to a fixed surface, so you don’t develop your balancing abilities as you lift them."

The peer-reviewed literature about yoga and proprioception is very limited. I could find only one open-access article (actually a letter):

Krishnamurthy M, Telles S. Effects of Yoga and an Ayurveda preparation on gait, balance and mobility in older persons. Med Sci Monit. 2007 Dec;13(12):LE19-20. PMID: 18049442

So what else is available? PubMed currently lists 67 open-access review articles on proprioception, including one very intriguing paper:

Brown S, Martinez MJ, Parsons LM. The neural basis of human dance. Cereb Cortex. 2006 Aug;16(8):1157-67. Epub 2005 Oct 12. PMID: 16221923

For their study, researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio brain-scanned experienced amateur tango dancers with positron emission tomography as they performed tango steps to music. In just one of the useful aspects of their article, they provide a broad perspective on the role of dance in human development:

"Dance is a universal human behavior, one associated with group rituals (Sachs, 1937; Farnell, 1999). Although it is depicted in cave art from more than 20 000 years ago (Appenzeller, 1998), dance may be much more ancient than that. Dance may in fact be as old as the human capacities for bipedal walking and running, which date back 2–5 million years (Ward, 2002; Bramble and Lieberman, 2004)."

The article provides a detailed tour of these dancers’ brains as several areas lit up while they learned the steps (anterior cerebellar vermis), then danced to a regular, metric rhythm (right putamen, medial superior parietal lobule). Since existing PET technology requires that participants lie supine in a scanner, it isn’t clear how balance can be addressed in this research model. Still, this innovative study reflects an emerging capability to investigate physical processes that support skillfulness in movement, and certain aspects of the model may be applied to kinetic and proprioceptive functions of yoga practice.

"Our findings specifically elucidate for the first time the neural systems and subsystems that underlie dance. These observations imply that dance, as a universal human activity, involves a complex combination of processes related to the patterning of bipedal motion and to metric entrainment to musical rhythms. More broadly, this study brings us closer to a richer understanding of the neural and psychological bases of complex, species-specific creative and artistic behaviors. This study is part of a contemporary wave of research exploring new neuroscientific hypotheses in the context of activities such as musical performance, drawing, visual aesthetics, dance observation and the viewing of cinematic narratives (Ino et al., 2003; Kawabata and Zeki, 2003; Makuuchi et al., 2003; Cela-Conde et al., 2004; Hassan et al., 2004; Calvo-Merino et al., 2005; Parsons et al., 2005)."

 

CAMWatch: Posts about free-access, peer-reviewed articles on aspects of complementary medicine theory, practice and policy (about the blogger). This blog is not a source for medical advice.

technorati tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine yoga dance

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Deocaris CC, Widodo N, Wadhwa R, Kaul SC. Merger of ayurveda and tissue culture-based functional genomics: inspirations from systems biology. J Transl Med. 2008 Mar 18;6:14. PMID: 18348714

A team from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology reviews Ayurveda from a post-genomic perspective. The authors undertake an analysis of the most prominent therapeutic plant of Ayurveda, the Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera). From the manuscript:

What insights can we gain by analyzing the web of complexity of these networks associated with herbal drug action in a cell in system biology perspective? We should expect a major contribution from the bio-informatics resources towards the development and enrichment of traditional herbal medicine because such a perspective captures the uniqueness and complexity of drug action in a cell. Such holistic perspective also avoids the pitfall of being too reductionist, and in effect, mollifies some criticisms from traditional ethnopharmacologic researchers.

technorati tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine Ayurveda herbalism systems biology

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