A modern investment in age-old cures.

AuthorSelbert, Pamela
PositionTraditional healing, medicinal plants in Belize

GIVEN THEIR CHOICE of a physician, most people, it is safe to say, would not select a bush doctor from Belize. But according to Dr. Rosita Arvigo, a former Chicago doctor who has spent the past eight years studying medicinal plant remedies with a Belizean shaman (bush doctor), the ancient knowledge of these herbal heales could be important in far more sophisticated societies as well.

Mayan healers have been treating their people, says Dr. Arvigo, for more than 2000 years using medicinal trees, shrubs, vines, and roots that are growing literally just outside their back doors. And in her own experience working with the plants, Arvigo admits to having seen some remarkable cures from illnesses such as dysentery and urinary tract infection, and has observed relief from symptoms of arthritis and diabetes. However, with the increased availability of over-the-counter remedies to the Indians of Belize, even in remote corners of the Central American country, many people are abandoning bush doctor cures as old-fashioned. As the aged shamans die, with no one to replace them, their knowledge will die as well. "Traditionally a bush doctor would take an apprentice who remained in his tutelage for many years learning the ancient cures first hand," remarks Arvigo. "Nothing was ever written down."

The 49-year-old Arvigo came to the hilly, remote Cayo District in the western part of Belize in 1982. A practicing herbalist for over 20 years, she is a doctor of naprapathy, a profession founded in 1907 and based on traditional Czechoslovakian folk chiropractic and modern day chiropractic. Arvigo and her husband, Dr. Greg Shropshire, who shares her enthusiasm for herbal healing and works with her in Belize, received their training at the Chicago National College of Naprapathy. They live on Ix Chel Farm (named for the Mayan goddess of healing) on an ancient Mayan river settlement near the small town of San Ignacio. Arvigo is working closely with a local 92-year-old Mayan healer, Don Eligio Panti, who agreed to take her on as an apprentice. She has been busily recording Don Eligo's teachings as well as treating local patients at her own practice.

But the work at Ix Chel is likely to have an effect reaching far beyond the local populace. Located on the farm is the Ix Chel Tropical Research Center Ltd., which since its inception has worked with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, seeking remedies for some of the devastating illnesses that plague mankind. Incorporated as a nonprofit research foundation in 1989, the center was organized by Arvigo, Shropshire and Dr. Michael Balick, director of the Institute of Economic Botany at the New...

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