Medicine hunter Chris Kilham

Chris Kilham presents the keynote seminar at the Canadian Health Food Association show, where he will talk about his experiences in the Amazon, especially his work with acai, a purple fruit found in the rainforest. Admission is free, however donations to the Amazon International Rainforest Reserve are greatly appreciated. April 21, 7pm, Parkview Terrace, Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Chris has a threefold message. Firstly, he wants to educate people on the number one category of medicine on Earth: plant medicines. Secondly, all this has a strong environmental tie-in to the ways the plant medicine trade can help protect the natural environment. As indigenous Native people in traditional cultures have neither the access to markets, nor adequate resources, people like Chris Kilham provide invaluable assistance.

Chris Kilham Harvesting herbs Helping the rainforest

Interview by Joseph Roberts

Joseph Roberts: Plant medicine has a major competitor out there called synthetic pharmaceuticals.

Chris Kilham: Well, at least in terms of the history of the world, synthetic pharmaceuticals are a very brief flirtation. They got rolling in the early 1900s and picked up after World War II, but, fundamentally, synthetic pharmaceutical medicine is largely unproven, experimental and very dangerous. Three hundred thousand Americans die every year from the “proper” use of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. Those are bad odds, and those numbers come from compiled reports in medical journals. It’s very sobering.

Herbs are just plain safer. They’re far less expensive. They’ve been used as medicines by humans and protohumans for 60,000 years that we

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know of. They have a demonstrated track record in medicine. They form the basis of modern pharmacy – many life-saving drugs come directly from plants. It’s the largest sector of medicine on Earth.

The pharmaceutical industry has more money, but more people in the world are using plants for all the right reasons. So, I’m really advocating a sensible, proven, safe, effective approach to personal health care, rather than this new, strange, unproven, very lethal medicine that has cropped up extremely recently in history.

JR: Which also has an incredible marketing campaign behind it, like the current scare about the avian flu.

CK: There’s real and legitimate concern about this H5-N1 virus, because human flu outbreaks across the board come from animals, and the majority of human flu outbreaks do come from birds, notably ducks. The migratory pathways of birds cover the planet and these birds intersect at different places, like northern Alaska.

If, in fact, it’s enough of the world bird population, and if the particular flu virus they’re carrying mutates – as flu always does – there’s a real possibility of a lethal, horrific pandemic. That’s not to say it will happen, but I think there’s something to be concerned about. It could either be something we go, “Whew, that was close,” or it could be something that takes out hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Flu viruses are moving targets. They mutate, change, become different things. We’re dealing with a tremendous number of very onerous unknowns with the flu virus.

But, we do have over one million people dying every year from malaria – a huge awful thing. The problem is that most of the people in malaria countries aren’t really economically very well-off, so that’s a poor bet for pharmaceutical development. So, even though the World Health Organization

has urgently called for humanitarian assistance from the pharmaceutical sector, it’s like they don’t really care. It’s like, you know, who cares about AIDS in Africa, those are just black people, so it’s not significant to most of the people in power.

That’s an awful, awful thing, but the social economic power brokers in the world write off whole sectors of the human population.

JR: Did you see The Constant Gardener? CK: That was a wonderful movie. Right now, you have a huge scandal in the whole drug-testing world. The drug companies have migrated en masse to India for all of their testing. If you give Indian people a couple of rupees and say it’s a medical test, hey, they just plain go along with it. That’s a terrible thing. So, that movie is prescient and unfortunately entirely too true.

J R : G i v e n t h a t v a c c i n e immunizations are a roll of the dice, improving the quality of the immune system seems like a better bet.

CK : I t h i n k t hat ’s a lway s warranted, and increasingly now, bec au se people a re i m mu necontinued on p. 45