The Amazon Rainforest is the home of many plants and flowers that provide us with medicines, vaccines, and other pharmaceuticals. given the rainforests teeming biological diversity, its value to humanity as a laboratory of natural phenomena and as a medical storehouse is priceless. Medical researchers claim that if the Amazon Rainforest disappears, the plants that provide medical miracles will be lost forever.
Traveling through the Amazon on river highways without billboards and signs, only knowing what waits ahead by arriving and experiencing gives rise to many adventures both exciting and intriguing. When on one such trip, a small medical clinic appeared with a staff of doctors and nurses treating the local inhabitants.
One patient, a young boy of about ten years suffering from a brain tumor was being treated. visiting with the doctor he explained after traversing the rivers for almost thirty years gathering medicinal plants and indigenous remedies, he had become one of the foremost authorities on medicine for the Amazon. Receiving both medical and pharmacological degrees enabled him to assimilate this diverse knowledge into a variety of medical treatments that are highly successful not withstanding a treatment for cancer of which this young boy was successfully being treated.
On the return trip finding the young boy completely healthy and cured, I made further inquiry into this medical doctors treatment process where upon he explained, the treatment only required several weeks at the clinic and continued administration of the medicine for about a year. As 70% of the plants found active against cancer come from the rainforest, like the Rosemary Periwinkle (now extinct in the wild) produces a drug known to increase the survival rate of children suffering with leukemia from 20% to 80%. How many more lives can be saved by other rainforest plants? Less than 1% of the Amazon's 300,000 plants have ever been studied, we are destroying these life saving plants faster than we can discover their benefits.