Forest medicinal plants Program
Living Pharmacy
Learning About and Creating Therapies from
Forest Medicinal Plants
Forest therapies is the most recent version of our Forest Medicine program, reflecting our long standing interest in and experience with the medicinal plants native to the Atlantic Rainforest. Many people in our local community are well versed in the ways of plant lore and plant medicines, and our goal is to learn from them and with them, and to help preserve this indigenous knowledge.
Iracambi is a member of a nation-wide network run by Fiocruz, the highly respected research foundation that aims to catalog all the medicinal plants in Brazil. We also collaborate with the Federal University of Viçosa on medicinal plants research. Check the paper on Croton urucurana (Dragon’s Blood,) here.
Understanding and promoting the use of local medicinal plants is an important strategy for conserving the Atlantic Forest. If we lose the forest we lose its wealth of medicinal plants, but the more we learn about them and make them a part of our daily life, the more likely we are to protect them.
Forest Therapies has two long term goals: to conserve and protect the medicinal plants of the Atlantic Forest and to encourage people to use them to promote health and wellbeing. Here are our strategies.
1) Education: creating videos and workshops on how to recognize and use medicinal plants correctly.
2.Surveys and inventories: visiting and learning from local practitioners and creating a herbarium.
3) Conservation: monitoring and propagating medicinal plants that are endangered by habitat loss.
4) Bioprospection: studying formulas and creating products for health and wellbeing. Documenting these through articles and videos
Will you support us?
This small project is something we are deeply passionate about and we would love your support to help continue our journey. We want to reach more communities and help them to see the beauty and the benefits of using 100% natural products, thereby protecting the amazing biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest from unsustainable farming, pesticides and deforestation.
