These traditions are the least written down and the most often misrepresented. I have set them out briefly and with respect, and would encourage anyone interested to read what their own practitioners have written rather than what outsiders have written about them.
African traditional medicine is not one system but hundreds, and the World Health Organization estimates that a large majority of people across sub-Saharan Africa use it. Practitioners are typically both herbalist and spiritual counsellor, since illness is generally understood as having social and spiritual dimensions as well as physical ones.
The pharmacopoeia is enormous. Rauvolfia vomitoria, used for mental disturbance, is related to the Indian sarpagandha that gave modern medicine reserpine. Artemisia, aloe, and the Madagascar periwinkle — source of the leukaemia drugs vincristine and vinblastine — all come from this region.
Indigenous American medicine gave the world an extraordinary share of its drugs: cinchona bark for malaria, from which quinine came; coca, from which cocaine and then local anaesthesia came; ipecac; curare, used by Amazonian peoples on arrows and later as the basis of surgical muscle relaxants; and tobacco, which was ceremonial before it was commercial.
Practices include the sweat lodge, sacred plant ceremonies conducted by trained elders, and detailed regional herbal knowledge. Aztec medicine was sophisticated enough that Spanish physicians recorded it: the Badianus Manuscript of 1552 is an Aztec herbal written by an Aztec physician.
Aboriginal Australian healing traditions are among the oldest continuous practices on earth. Ngangkari healers of the Western Desert work with spiritual and physical wellbeing together and are now employed alongside doctors in some South Australian health services — a rare and interesting example of genuine integration. Tea tree and eucalyptus both entered world use from Aboriginal knowledge.
Hawaiian lomilomi massage and la’au lapa’au plant medicine, Maori rongoa, and the widespread use of kava across Polynesia — kava being one of the traditional preparations with real evidence for anxiety, and also real evidence of liver risk in some extracted forms.
Much indigenous medical knowledge has been taken without consent or credit, and pharmaceutical value derived from it without benefit returning to the communities that held it. The Nagoya Protocol exists to address this.
Ceremonial practices in particular belong to specific peoples. Treating them as available to anyone who is curious is not respect, and several of the plants involved are legally controlled and genuinely dangerous outside their proper setting.
This site is a personal account and a record of traditional practice, shared for information. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a treatment for any disease. I am not a doctor.
If you are unwell — and especially if you have a serious illness such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease — please stay under the care of a qualified physician. Nothing here should replace or delay that care.