Medicinal plants in Mexico: Healers' consensus and cultural importance

Medicinal plants are an important element of indigenous medical systems in Mexico. These resources are usually regarded as part of a culture's traditi onal knowledge. This study examines the use of medicinal plants in four ind igenous groups of Mexican Indians, Maya, Nahua, Zapotec and - for comparati ve purposes - Mire. With the first three the methodology was similar. makin g a direct com parison of the results possible. In these studies, the relat ive importance of a medicinal plant within a culture is documented using a quantitative method. For the analysis the uses were grouped into 9-10 categ ories of indigenous uses. This report compares these data and uses the conc ept of informant consensus originally developed by Trotter and Logan for an alysis. This indicates how homogenous the ethnobotanical information is. Ge nerally the factor is high for gastrointestinal illnesses and for culture b ound syndromes. While the species used by the 3 indigenous groups vary, the data indicate that there exist well-defined criteria specific for each cul ture which lead to the selection of a plant as a medicine. A large number o f species are used for gastrointestinal illnesses by two or more of the ind igenous groups. At least in this case, the multiple transfer of species and their uses within Mexico seems to be an important reason for the widesprea d use of a species, Medicinal plants in other categories (e.g. skin disease s) are usually known only in one culture and seem to be part of its traditi onal knowledge. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.