Pharmacy student learns about traditional medicine from Ecuador experts
When Brendon Virtucio heard that a group of students from Rady Faculty of Health Sciences was going to South America to learn from Indigenous healers, he jumped at the chance.
“When are you ever going to go into the Amazon and learn about traditional medicines? said the PharmD student. “Other people were like, ‘I don’t want to go. There’s going to be soooo many spiders!’ But I was willing to try everything and anything.”
The group arrived in the Andes mountains in Ecuador, then journeyed on to a small healing and birthing centre in the Amazon rain forest run by a collective of Kichwa healers and midwives.
“I really had no expectations, but when I got there it shocked me because it was very similar to my childhood in the Philippines,” said Virtucio. “The people looked different and they spoke another language, but for the most part, everything looked the same.”
