Remedia's Important Work

Why is our work so important?

• Practices of traditional medicine and knowledge of medicinal plants, with the potential to heal many, both locally and globally, are declining throughout the world.  Elder healers who have studied advanced traditional medical therapies, which have been developed, honed, and passed on from generation to generation, are now passing away without transmitting their incredibly valuable knowledge on to the next generation. 

• The local implications of this are of urgent and critical concern.  Consider that more than one third of all people in developing countries do not have access to essential medicines.  The World Health Organization (WHO) asserts that “the provision of safe and effective traditional medicine and CAM (complementary and alternative medical) therapies could become a critical tool to increase access to health care."

• The global implications of this are also of significant concern.  The WHO reports that in North America, Europe and other industrialized world regions, more than half of the population has utilized alternative or complementary medicine.   In some countries, such as Canada, as much as seventy percent of the population has used one or more natural remedies for the treatment or prevention of their health ailments.

• Furthermore, one quarter of modern medicines are made from medicinal plants first used in traditional medicine, and have produced such important therapeutics as aspirin, quinine, and cancer treatments vincristine and vinblastine.  Despite these and other notable life-saving medicines developed from plants first used in traditional medicine, less than 1% of the estimated 420,000 flowering plants in the world have been exhaustively screened for their chemical content and associated medicinal value.