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LESSONS FROM THE FIELD
This series of essays explores lessons and observations from fieldwork that might be of interest to the integrative medical community. In this context, the authors discuss "new" or less celebrated botanical medicines and unique healing practices that may contribute to the further development of contemporary integrative medical practices. Perhaps this column can facilitate an appreciation for our own roots and those of other cultures, before such ancient wisdom disappears forever.
The 2 students looked at each other and the environment around them in something approaching disbelief. Only a few weeks before, they had been in the verdant Amazonian rain forest, surrounded by trees more than 100 feet tall, bathed in warmth and copious rainfall. Now they had arrived in an area described as one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, in search of the roots and tubers cultivated there by local farmers. They had traveled for days by train, bus, and, finally, in the back of an ancient truck whose driver dropped them off on a dusty road and pointed toward the peak of a mountain with the admonition, "Walk along that trail, and you will find the village of Ninacaca; it is there you will find the plants you are interested in."
The year was 1982, and Harvard PhD student Calvin Sperling and his assistant, Steven King, slowly followed the trail, measuring their steps carefully: the elevation was nearly 13000 feet above sea level. Their cheeks were packed with coca leaves and time, as is the local custom, to ward off soroche, or altitude sickness. This part of the world is cold and very windy, and the mountainous environment is barren, covered with rocks and low-- growing plants, most less than a foot tall. In Peru, this habitat is known as the Puna, characterized by freezing temperatures and winds strong enough to knock people off their horses.
Sperling and King had come to Ninacaca not in search of gold, as had the Spanish Conquistadors a half-century before, but to learn about some of the little-known root crops grown by the people of this region. Characterized by a report of the National Research Council as "among the world's worst farmland"1 because of its climate and terrain, Ninacaca...