Plants That Save Lives
One of the sad effects of cutting down the rainforests is that scientists believe many of the plants found in them hold the key to curing human diseases. As a matter of fact, almost half of the drugs made in the United States came from the work done on wild plants. Some plant cures are simply amazing!
Make Your Own Plant Guide
Be the only one in your neighborhood who knows all the names of the trees on the block. Make your own guide. You'll need a few sheets of white paper, a soft-tipped pencil or charcoal, a heavy book, a three-ringed binder (an old recycled one will do), a hole puncher, and a tree guide from the library.
Collect one leaf from each tree in your yard. If it is an evergreen collect a small stem with a few needles or bundles of needles on them.
Place them between two pieces of paper and press them flat under a heavy book overnight.
Take your newly flattened leaves out and lay each under a piece of paper and do a rubbing with a soft-tipped pencil. Take away the leaf and then use the pencil to darken the outlined leaf drawing and its features. (You might be able to fit 3 to 4 leaves on each 8.5″ × 11″ sheet of paper.),
Using a tree guide, identify your tree types and write their common and Latin names under each leaf. Punch holes in each sheet to fit your binder and collect them inside.
When you discover new trees, add them to your collection, too!
Before scientists discovered the medicine that could be made from the rosy periwinkle, 90 percent of all children that got childhood leukemia died from it. Then in the 1960s scientists began testing the small, pink flower from Madagascar. They discovered that extracts from the plant had a great healing effect. Now children have a 90 percent recovery rate from leukemia instead of 10 percent. All from a little pink flower from the rainforests of Madagascar! To the children suffering from that terrible disease, the rosy periwinkle is a miracle drug.
Other examples are just as stunning. As early as the 1700s, a doctor and botanist named William Wuthering discovered that when he ground up leaves of the wildflower foxglove and gave it to a patient, it would cause their heart to beat harder. When he gave it to people in the middle of heart failure, the drug made their heart beat strongly again! This became a heart drug that is still used today, called digitalis.
Visiting the Rainforest for CuresScientists make trips into the rainforest to talk to native peoples who use local plants to cure diseases. Considered folklore by many people for a long time, scientists finally began to realize that there must be a reason why natives have used these plants to cure illnesses for generations. The answer is, they work! The study of how natives use herbal treatments is called ethnobotany and has led to many great medical discoveries. There is a race against time now to discover what medicinal treasures are still to be found in our rainforests before they disappear forever under the clearing bulldozers' blades.
