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SÃO PAULO, SP (FOLHAPRESS) – By interviewing Amazonian Indians to find out what pains they were feeling and how they were treating them, nurse Elaine Barbosa de Moraes, 42, was suffering from pain. a repetitive microtomy in his arms. The problem lasted five years, with little improvement over cold anti-inflammatories and compresses.
One of the village women then applied a resin called white pitch, extracted from the tree of the same name and mixed with annatto. The remedy had been prepared by the shaman, who was singing around him for hours to activate his effect.
Three days later, the pain disappeared, and the effect lasted four months.
Personal experience illustrates what Elaine found in her research for the Israeli Institute of Education and Research Albert Einstein, linked to the hospital: although the So-called "white remedies" are used by 86.7% of Aboriginal women that she interviewed, the medications only relieve pain for 22.2% of them.
Local badgesic alternatives already used by 80% are effective in 64.5% of cases. Among the indigenous treatments, the most used are those they call bush remedies (75.6%) made with plants. But there are other ways to treat pain, such as rituals, bathing, prayer, frog poison, ant bites, singing and smoke.
The data is part of the master defended by the nurse last month.
With the support of the FAPESP (Foundation for Research Support of the State of São Paulo), she led in 2017 a team of researchers who traveled for several days in the Amazon rainforest by plane, car, motorcycle, motorboat, rowing boat and cross a closed forest until reaching the villages of the Javari Valley. Located in the west of the Amazon, it is the region that has the largest number of isolated indigenous peoples in the world.
Pioneering, the study highlights the need to create a dialogue between conventional medicine and indigenous medicine, which would be good not just for Indians, says Elaine, but for all.
"We Brazilians do not value the ancestral knowledge we have, we accept Chinese medicine and we pay dearly, but we know little about indigenous therapies," says the nurse researcher. and professor of Unip's Manaus Unit.
Eliseth Leão, 54, is a professor and researcher at Einstein. She accompanied Elaine in the expedition and made the photos used at work.
"In Brazil, it seems that Indians do not even exist, many allopathic remedies come from the products they use, and we forget the wealth left to biopiracy. Indian service and study what practices of them can be inserted With security in other contexts, this integration would be important for both parties, "he says.
The sample included 45 men and women from three different ethnic groups: Marubo, Canamari and Matis (the latter having no contact with non-Indians until the late 1970s) , as well as 36 employees of the Special Sanitary District (DSEI), a federal government agency linked to SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde).
To dialogue with the natives, who do not speak Portuguese, the researchers needed interpreters. At the time of the interview, 77.8% of them said they were suffering, especially in the trunk, as well as headaches and teeth.
With the DSEI team, Elaine probed the qualification for the job and how she treats the patients' pain. There are 265 professionals for the more than 5,400 Indians from Vale do Javari, including six doctors, six dentists and a psychologist. There are 40 nurses, but the highest number of nursing technicians, 82. Of the respondents, only 11.1% are Aboriginal.
The shortage of doctors in these areas, explains Elaine, has generated protocols that allow nurses to do the work of listening to complaints from Indians and to indicate treatments.
In this scenario, they do something that is forbidden: the prescription of opioids, such as morphine. Produced from opium, poppy extract, can only be prescribed by doctors and as a special prescription, kept by pharmacies. They are used for acute pain and can have a hallucinogenic effect and cause addiction and death by overdose.
In the study, opioids accounted for 13.9% of prescribed badgesic treatments. Non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs were predominant (69.4%), followed by muscle relaxants (44.4%) and corticosteroids (38.9%). To a lesser extent than opioids, another controlled drug, the antidepressant, appeared in 2.8% of the responses.
Elaine meditated in her thesis that the citation of these restricted-use drugs could be a consequence of a misunderstanding in the staff of the DSEI who completed the investigation.
According to the report, if this really happens, the fault should not be taken into account by the professionals, but rather by the precariousness of the training and the insufficiency of the investments in the health of the autochthonous populations.
Another result, according to Elaine, could account for the ineffectiveness of conventional medicine in treating Indians: 37.9% of them heal themselves with "white remedies".
"We are talking about a very precarious situation, difficult access, clinics set up in huts, professionals working in difficult conditions and without preparation to face a culture different from theirs", says Elaine, who has prepared an introduction with guidelines on pain management to be distributed in the region, in Portuguese and in the languages of the ethnicities studied.
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