Beyond Plants Professionals & Parchments: The role of home-based medicinal plant use and traditional health knowledge in primary health care in Ethiopia

This paper is concerned with the use of medicinal plantsand the related lay traditional health knowledge and practicesamong rural communities in the Bahir Dar ZuriaWereda (district) of Gojam located in the northwesternhighlands of Ethiopia.Much of the research on Ethiopian traditional medicineand medicinal plants to date has been carried out in acompartmentalized manner, with researchers from variousdisciplines pursuing their interests in the subject inrelative isolation. Most studies have been driven by aspecific interest in the properties of particular medicinalplants, focusing on two main sources of information, i.e.,the knowledge of professional traditional health practitionersand the ancient medico-religious herbal manuscriptswith which, the religious traditional health practitioners ordebterra, in particular, are closely associated. Focus onthe professional realm of traditional health has detractedattention from others in the community who may also beknowledgeable about plant-derived treatments and culturalhealth practices. Due to the resulting overall ‘plantfocus’,relatively little attention has been paid to the localsocio-cultural context in which many medicinal plants continueto be used by ordinary local people and knowledgeabout them developed and passed on over generations.The preliminary findings of a study seeking to addressthis research gap by focusing on lay community membersare presented here. Qualitative and quantitative analysisof the data gathered through the main phase of the fieldresearch (carried out over the period August-December,2000) is still underway. Nevertheless, this presentation offersan opportunity to discuss some of the general trendsand preliminary findings of the household surveys and interviewsheld with members of five rural farming communitiesin Bahir Dar Zuria and to revisit the central hypothesisand objectives of the research in light of these findings.