Emergency Health Fund for the Shipibo people

 This first half of the year we decided to articulate the efforts of Alianza Arkana with Comando Matico, a collective of Shipibo activist volunteers who treated patients with covid-19 using medicinal plants and conventional medicine.  Through an agreement between our institution and the collective we used the donations to finance the actions of this collective and to be able to reach more people.

In this way we started home visits with an interdisciplinary team of traditional doctors, nursing technicians and mental health professionals, to treat the sequelae left by covid-19 in the indigenous population, finding mental health problems such as depression, generalized anxiety, chronic stress, suicidal ideation and post-traumatic stress disorder. We also found physical health problems and diseases such as tuberculosis, malnutrition, parasitosis, body discomfort (abdominal pains), gastritis and diabetes.

During the interventions, traditional treatments were performed with medicinal plants through techniques such as vaporization, massages and infusions. Likewise, vital signs were taken and medications were administered according to the diagnoses.

We hope to continue working to approach the new physical and mental health problems that the pandemic has left in the Shipibo population, and for this important work we know that we have the support of all those who feel identified with the native peoples and the ancestral wisdom about medicinal plants that the Shipibo people keep alive through their communitarian and popular health practices.