In an interview with a Nicaraguan man who moved to Costa Rica when
he was fifteen because his father told him to go find work, he told me that
Costa Ricans don’t use traditional medicine nearly as much as Nicaraguans. He
said that when he first moved here, more people knew about the healing effects
of plants. But now they all just use La Caja, the Costa Rican nationalized
health system. At dinner with my host brother in San Jose, he told me that he
couldn’t believe his father still made him drink lemon tea when he had a sore
throat. It was an action reflective of a relic of a dying tradition, and one
that he did not seem sorry to see go. On a small farm in Boruca, a woman with
no native heritage, but who had married a Borucan man and immersed herself in
their culture showed us a book she wrote about traditional uses of plants both
in cooking and in medicine. She wrote this book to try to save this knowledge
that no one from the younger generations seemed interested in preserving. It
seemed, at first, that the youth of Costa Rica has collectively decided to
ignore the knowledge of their grandparents in favor of the shining promise of
“real” science. Teas and tinctures for white pills and white coats. So if
everyone appears to be running away from this burning building, why is it that
we are going toward it trying to salvage its remains?
How about we approach
this question by trial and error? Attempt number one: the cure for cancer is
somewhere in that forest and it’s our job to find the person that knows about
it before they die and the plant species before it dies. This answer seems nice
at first until you consider that championing indigenous knowledge as your own
discovery is not necessarily the most ethical thing to do and that testing the
effectiveness of plants against cancer cell lines is a worthy cause, but it
simply isn’t what we are doing. Moving right along then to attempt number two: the
US needs to return to natural medicine because our synthetic medicines are
toxic. I’m never one to knock the safe use of natural or tradition medicines.
The real problem with this solution instead lies in the fact that it suggests
that the usefulness of traditional knowledge is primarily to satisfy the
desires of people from the US, or members of other cultures no longer grounded
in their own medicinal traditions.
My faith instead
lies in attempt number three: the initial assumption is incorrect and the
entire country of Costa Rica is not truly running away from traditional
medicine. If you visit any of the biggest and fanciest malls in San Jose, there
is a very US consumerism feel to them. Walking down the San Jose streets, there
is store after store offering “American styles” and “American imported brands”.
As is the case in many foreign countries, especially in the Americas, a major
part of the mainstream chic is to dress and act like you are from the US, and
the US method, with the exception of a few questionable nutritional
supplements, is to avoid traditional medicine. Therefore, when talking to a
person from the United States and an outsider, it is no surprise that most
Costa Ricans I spoke to seemed to reject that aspect of their culture. So then
why is it useful for us to come here? Maybe if we as future medical and public
health professionals could understand the culture of traditional medicine and
realize that the vast majority of our synthetic medications are based on
biological molecules and steer clear of the generalized rejection of all
plant-based medicine that is so common in the field in the US, we might change
the culture of medicine in the US just a little bit, because the rejection of
one’s own culture due to the close mindedness of another is truly a tragedy.
By Michael Rosamilia
