No Refills
GUNGDRUNG
TSEWANG SHOWS me his plant repository, a large
room crammed with plastic bags and bowls filled
with herbs. Dressed for summer in a blue
polo-shirt and black baseball cap, the
39-year-old sniffs a handful of drying leaves,
and cheerily tells me they are almost ready to
use in medicines. Images of colorful Tibetan
deities hang on the walls. Dozens of sprigs of
dried plants have been pinned to wooden
paneling, their names labelled underneath in
Tibetan, Nepali, and English.
Yungdrung
is an amchi, a practitioner of Tibetan
medicine — a traditional form of healing that
has been practiced across the Tibetan plateau
for over a thousand years. This room, adjoining
his small clinic, is where he dries, cooks,
grinds, and mixes the numerous flowers, leaves,
roots, seeds, and barks that make up the herbal
medicines he gives his patients.
The
clinic is located in Dolpo, a remote and
mountainous area in the upper part of
northwestern Nepal’s Dolpa District. Most of
Dolpo is above 3,500 meters in altitude, and
almost every settlement here is separated from
the next by a pass of over 5,000 meters…. Dolpo
has few government services providing
conventional healthcare.… As with many other
remote Himalayan regions, the communities here,
therefore, rely heavily on Tibetan medicine for
most of their healthcare needs.
Yungdrung
collects many of the plants he needs from the
surrounding mountains…. However, over the last
few years he has been encountering unprecedented
challenges in sourcing many of these plants and
fungi.
Many
medicinal plants, herbs, and fungi are becoming
scarcer and their habitats shifting upwards,
Yungdrung says. Some species, he notes, have
simply vanished from their usual habitats. He
points to a photograph of a yellow flower tacked
to the wall. “This herb, serme
(Herpetospermum pedunculosum), a bitter
herb, used to grow in nearby areas, but I have
never seen it,” he says. “I’ve heard of many
herbs that used to grow here but that I haven’t
seen. This is a climate problem.”
But
climate isn’t the only factor impacting these
species.
Journalist Eileen McDougall
writes about the double whammy of climate change
and a growing interest in alternative medicine
impacting the work of traditional healers who
people in Nepal’s remote, high-altitude villages
rely on for basic healthcare.
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