Folk Medicine

Wrap up warm! Sip your chicken soup! Drink this garlic tea, this ginger tea or lie back and relax while Grandma rubs you down with her camphor oil cure-all. When colds and flu lay loved ones low, venerated family matriarchs the world over step in with their trusty home remedies. It's hard to know whether these things really work: The scientific journals aren't exactly stuffed with studies testing the efficacy of chewing garlic or gargling with water laced with mashed-up horseradish.

The fight to save tigers and rhinoceroses from extinction moved to Los Angeles this month, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced an educational campaign to turn people away from Asian medicines made from the animals' bones and horns. Slaughtering of the animals for use in such medicines has cut the worldwide population of wild tigers to about 5,000, and wild rhinos to fewer than 10,000, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Naked to the waist, his huge head shaved bald, Atchedo Nassessode reached out from the unlighted shack that is his place of business and proffered his card. "Chief Fetishist, Traditional Healer," it read. "Explicator of African Voodoo Forces." Finally it gave his address: the huge fetish market in this suburb of the capital of Togo, down a long red-clay road, hard by the city dump. Outside in the bleached afternoon sun the market stalls were open.

Donkey skin, powdered clam shell and ginseng root are among the 10 ingredients of a special Chinese herbal soup that 72-year-old Madame Ng has been drinking for the past decade to build up her vitality and resistance. Citing the advice of her personal "drug practitioner," Chan Hung Lam, she explained that by swallowing a cupful of the mixture every morning and evening for a total of six weeks each year, her enduring energy and glowing complexion can be restored.

When Juliet Cheng's baby girl was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, she turned to traditional Chinese remedies: acupuncture, herbal medicines and massage. But now Cheng, who emigrated from China a decade ago, is running out of time to prove that her faith in her ancestors' medicine is not misplaced and that her daughter won't face the rest of her life crippled because of the treatments. Cheng already has lost temporary custody of her daughter, Shirley, now 7.

It's cold season. You'd have to live in a cave not to know it. The sneezing. The coughing. The ads that promise relief from sneezing and coughing. But not everybody in town is snorting nasal spray and popping decongestants. In certain circles--and not necessarily the ones you might expect--a vile-smelling brown liquid is making the rounds, passed from friend to friend, even recommended by some physicians.

Out there in the tropical rain forests, known only to primitive tribes and perhaps not even to them, is a shrub or a vine that can save men's lives--if it survives their depredations. The green canopies that cover the heart of Africa, the Amazon Basin and southern Asia have yielded medicinal secrets since the dawn of man. Quinine, extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, quells the fever of malaria.

The morning activities here in the first-floor office of the Catawba Nation's Longhouse are similar to those at any small clinic in America. Dr. David Brady examines his first patient, 8-year-old Amy Canty, who stares straight ahead as he gently touches the rash on her neck. "Looks like contact dermatitis, an allergy," Brady explains to her mother. "You'll need to pick up some 1% hydrocortisone ointment. . . . Bring her back if there's no improvement."

A judge refused Friday to reinstate a doctor's medical license that had been revoked by state officials after he treated up to 6,000 allergy patients, including those at an Anaheim clinic, by injecting them with their own urine. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge John Zebrowski denied an appeal by Dr. George R. Borrell to overturn a Dec. 4 cancellation of his license by the Medical Board of California.

At the first sign of a cold, actress Beulah Quo doesn't turn to aspirin or Contac. She reaches for a packet of Chinese herbal medicine in her freezer. She boils the dozen dried herbs and bark in the packet--prescribed by her herbalist father 30 years ago--in four cups of water, simmering it until the liquid is reduced to a mere cupful. Then, she drinks the bitter brown brew before going to bed, and says that in the morning she invariably feels better.