Ayahuasca Healing

In South America, healers have used a certain drug for centuries to help combat disease. This drug, known as ayahuasca is little known in the United States and has largely remained a mainstay of its indigenous region as a healing potion rather than a recreational drug. Furthermore, the extremely varied preparation of the drug has allowed it to resist easy concoction or standardization. For these reasons, ayahuasca has not reached controlled status in the United States, and is unlikely to do so any time in the near future. Although an interesting psychedelic drug, the role of ayahuasca in local South American culture and history is much more interesting than its effects as a mere drug or intoxicant. The following information has largely been obtained from a 1972 work by Marlene Dobkin de Rios entitled "Ayahuasca and its Mechanism of Healing" as well as other selected articles collected via Erowid.org.

Ayahuasca is a powerful psychedelic concoction brewed from ingredients found in the Amazon region of South America. Unlike other psychedelics such as peyote or psilocybin mushrooms, the ingredients in ayahuasca produce no effect when taken individually. An extremely variable and personalized preparation, the drug varies in its composition depending on who is creating it. However, in general, ayahuasca is made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the leaves of the Psychotria viridis bush. The latter's leaves contain the psychoactive chemical DMT, but DMT is unable to be activated when taken orally. It needs what is known as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), a substance known by many to be used in pharmaceutical prescriptions for depression. The MAOI allows DMT to be released when taken orally, and in the case of ayahuasca, the MAOI is found in the Banisteriopsis caapi vine. Thus, ayahuasca is a drug that relies on a synergistic relationship between different ingredients.

Ayahuasca has long been prepared by shamans throughout the Peruvian jungle in South America. These shamans, often called ayahuasqueros, are selective about the patients they will utilize ayahuasca for and use many other healing techniques including medicinal, mental, and physical in conjunction. Interestingly enough, both the healer and the patient take ayahuasca, though their roles in the process are quite different. The patient is to explore inwardly while the healer focuses on the ritual and looking outside himself into the patient for clues and signs that might help in the healing process. The ayahuasca is used partially as an agent for helping the patient discover what has caused him or her the illness with which they have become afflicted.

As opposed to many other Westernized healing techniques, much of the ayahuasca healing process involves little verbal interaction between the patient and the healer. Music might be used to help switch gears of the ayahuasca experience from an intellectual experience to a sensory or feeling experience. These alterations of the experience are used to help the shaman and patient better discern the dark forces behind the illness in question.

There is marked skepticism toward ayahuasca as a true healing agent in the medical community, particularly with respect to its alleged use as primarily a placebo. In other words, the sick patient who takes ayahuasca believes that he will benefit from the preparation. This might be true to a large extent. However, as Dobkin de Rios points out, ayahuasca should not be construed as an actual medicinal herb, but rather as a means to an end which can help facilitate the healing process between shaman and patient.

In terms of a Western medical benchmark, ayahuasca healing can be compared to psychotherapy and Freud's use of hypnosis to probe the unconscious. Unfortunately in our society of increased use of medical prescription, diagnoses, and brain chemistry, Freud's ideas have largely fallen out of favor over the past few decades within the medical community. Statistics on the success rate of ayahuasca in healing have not been compiled, and frankly I am not interested. Ayahuasca should be viewed as indicative of a stage in human medicine still at work today in which modern concepts of bacteriology and virology do not apply. Ayahuasca healing depends on a firm belief in metaphysical concepts of light and dark, good and evil. Although to many of us, these concepts of "evil spirits" and "forces of light" might seem archaic and largely misguided, but to those who have believed and based practice around these concepts for centuries, it is a way of life. Ayahuasca should be viewed within this context-a fascinating glimpse into the otherworldly on Earth.