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FILE: §Ethnopharmacology §Ethnobotany §Interdisciplinary research HC 090415-219 Date: October 31, 2002 RE: Article Reviews Articles in Two Major Journals to Determine Interdisplinary Links Between Bioscience and Traditional Medicine
Etkin NL. Perspectives in ethnopharmacology: forging a closer link between bioscience and traditional empirical knowledge. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 2001; 76:177-182. Ethnopharmacology is a field of science that combines research on the pharmacology of an herbal with cultural information on how the herbal is used as a medicine by the indigenous native people. The purpose of this scientific field is to understand the context that a drug/herb is used by native people, and then to investigate the properties of the drug from a scientific perspective. For example, the flowers of a certain plant may be used by a tribe to treat burns. Ethnopharmacologists would first study the ethnic context of the flowers: how does the tribe select and process the flowers to prepare them into an ointment? Scientists would then take the flowers and ointment to a laboratory to study the chemical and pharmacological properties of the flowers in order to understand how they help in healing burns. Ultimately, one goal of enthopharmacology is to apply discoveries in a way that benefits both scientists and the native people that use the herbs as medicine. This article investigates how well research articles published in two major journals of ethnopharmacology met the goal of integrating science and the cultural context of an herb. The journals analyzed were the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (JEP) and Pharmaceutical Biology (PB). Based on the content of the articles published, each journal was systematically examined and classified into one of seven mutually exclusive categories. Six hundred and thirty-four articles from JEP and 279 articles from PB published in the time period from 1996-2000 were examined and classified. The categories used for classification were: 1) Ethnography Alone 2) Pharmacology Alone 3) Primarily Pharmacology 4) Interdisciplinary 5) Ecology/Taxonomy 6) Safety/Regulation 7) Miscellany. Only 4% of the articles published in JEP or PB were classified as interdisciplinary, meaning that they integrated scientific information with the cultural context of the herb studied. Thus, only 4% of articles could be considered "ethnopharmacological studies." The majority of articles had pharmacological information about an herb with little or no cultural context. The "Pharmacology alone" category contained 47% and 71% of the articles published in JEP and PB, respectively. The "Primarily Pharmacology"
category contained 38% and 17% of the articles published in JEP and PB, respectively. An example of an article classified as "Pharmacological alone" is the following: one research group tested extracts of barleria (Barleria prionitis aka popcorn flower) for antifertility effects, but commented that the plant was not used for mediating fertility in Indian indigenous medicine, but rather for treating fever, cataracts, and boils. Thus, the research did not integrate the scientific study of the herb with the medicinal context from the Indian culture. The remaining categories contained the following percentages: "Ethnography alone" made up 4% and 1% in JEP and PB, respectively, "Ecology/Taxonomy" made up less than 1% in each journal, "Safety/Regulation" made up 6% and 4% in JEP and PB, respectively, and "Miscellany" made up 1% and 2% of the articles in JEP and PB, respectively. The author states that most articles published in these journals were not actually meeting the definition of ethnopharmacology. Instead, the majority focused only on the pharmacology of an herb without relevance to the cultural context in which the herb is used. While these studies contain important scientific information, they are not ethnopharmacological studies. The author conclude that researchers who publish in journals of ethnopharmacology should make their studies relevant to the medicinal and cultural context where an herb is natively used. Another consideration for the author was consulting literature outside a researcher's own discipline to enrich cultural interpretations for an herb's medicinal actions.
—Heather S. Oliff, Ph.D.
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