The families of nearly half of Los Angeles County's 8.8 million residents came from Latin America, the Caribbean and the American South. Because 38% of Latinos and 22% of African Americans lack health insurance, they have limited access to preventive medicine and often delay professional treatment. Botanicas have burgeoned as an alternative health resource. However, little is known about the spiritual, counseling and herbal practices they offer--whom they treat, how or why, and the nature, number, sources, efficacy or safety of the herbal therapies they dispense or employ. This project will document the ethnomedical and spiritual systems of botanicas, providing detailed case studies, interviews and observational data regarding diagnostic and treatment approaches as well as provider beliefs with particular attention to herbal therapies including sources, collection, processing and therapeutic uses of medicinal plants. Results of the study can contribute to increasing the quality of clinical research that evaluates the efficacy of traditional indigenous systems of medicine by discovering the most frequently used plants for the most commonly treated ailments as well as revealing the cultural context of health beliefs and therapeutic practices. While attention has been paid to testing Chinese herbs and selected plants in mainstream Euro-American culture, other traditions remain largely unexplored. Much of the botanical and pharmacological research that has been conducted lacks information on the harvesting of plants (season, time of day, state of plant development), storage, preparation, dosage and route of administration-crucial data for clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of herbal medicine as it is actually practiced. Previous research also often misses ethnographical details of the social, symbolic and ritual aspects of plant collection, preparation and usage that may influence the outcome of therapy. This study seeks to uncover such ethnobotanical and ethnographic information, which can serve in future to help educate health personnel about aspects of the ethnomedical and spiritual approaches relied upon by many immigrants and advance the design of methods for testing possible effectiveness of these treatment approaches.
