Leaves of Life: Vol 1. Select Medicinal Plants of Guyana with Healing Properties

Leaves of Life, Volume1: Single Plants, the author of the Behutet series and native of Guyana, posits the view that herbal medicine is becoming more popular in contemporary life and that there is a herbal remedy for any ailment. Scientists have come to recognize the capacity of the rainforest to treat or cure ailments and diseases that plague modern life, such as AIDS, cancers, venereal diseases, heart problems, diabetes, Alzheimer's, arthritis, infertility, leukemia, multiple sclerosis and more. This priceless resource of over one hundred and twenty single Plants, thought to be lost over the generations, will ever be at your finger tips. Leaves of Life, Volume1: Single Plants, cites the enormous importance of the natural world of plants at a time when plant resources are decreasing at a rapid rate. No other time in history have human beings placed such importance on the natural world of plants. Guyana, which lies at the point where the Caribbean meets South America on its North Atlantic seaboard, consists of 80% rainforest and is home to one of the richest regions of the world with expanses of untouched neotropical forests and different species of plants found nowhere else on earth. Leaves of Life, Volume1: Single Plants reveals the true secrets of its tropical vegetation which was traditionally confined to the "Bush Men", the individuals who make their living off the local plant lore. These secrets have eluded European explorers like Walter Raleigh, the first European to record the existence of curare, a paralytic, plant-derived poison used in fishing and hunting in Guyana. Curare causes death by asphyxiation through the loss of control of muscles essential in respiration and is used in modern medicine as a muscle relaxant for shock treatment of mental illness, and as an adjunct to anaesthesia in heart surgery.