Public Health Minister Volda Lawrence (MP) wants to push joint research activities in the use of alternative or folk medicine between Guyana and China using this country’s “untapped resources” in the Amazon.
Lawrence told a Chinese delegation during a courtesy call at her office today, that Guyana has vast resources in the Amazon which extends some six – eight million square kilometres covering much of northwestern Brazil, extending into Colombia, Peru and other South American territories.
As the single largest remaining tropical rainforest in the world and housing some 10 percent of the world’s known biodiversity, Lawrence told Yuanzheng Huang, Vice Mayor of the populous city of Lianyungang, that she is looking forward for a pact between Guyana and China to establish a research laboratory utilising the rich flora and fauna of the Amazon.
China “has a lot to offer after blazing the trail for the last 300 years” Lawrence told Huang whose country has popularised the use of folk medicine as part of the regimen offered patients of one the most populous countries on the Asian Continent.
Since taking over the public health portfolio almost a year now, Minister Lawrence has been exploring ways of guaranteeing the acceptance of local alternative, folk or traditional medicine “within the governmental structure”.
“China has a huge advantage in the use of traditional medicine” Mayor Huang said.
Traditional Chinese medicine is a broad range of medicine practices sharing common concepts which have been developed in China and are based on a tradition of more than 2,000 years including various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, exercise and dietary therapy.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines traditional medicine as ‘the sum of the total knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis improvement of treatment of physical and mental illness.”