Dying Amazon healers are taking potential cures for cancer, AIDS and other diseases with them

Dying Amazon healers are taking potential cures for cancer, AIDS and other diseases with them
SANTA CLARA, Peru — “Every time a shaman dies, it is as though a book is burned,” says Jose Roque mournfully as he hacks through a vine with a machete. The 63-year-old indigenous Shipibo healer is showing me around an overgrown jungle garden behind the traditional thatched-roof hut he calls home here in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. Roque has long been cultivating plants on this dense patch of rain forest to treat a host of ills, including headaches, nausea, inflammation, skin rashes and menstrual pains. Once dismissed as primitive charlatans, medicine men…Read more …