he brings ancestral knowledge to the academy

What are these barriers?
The main thing is funds. Then, normative fragmentation. There are many federal and municipal laws that cannot interconnect. So, for example, the municipality of Salvador has laws related to cannabis, but São Francisco do Conde does not. This scenario makes bureaucracy slow. At the gym, we need to validate everything, even if the healer doesn’t need to be validated.

Furthermore, there is the issue of Brazil being dependent on importing resources. Most of the inputs we have in the country come from China and India. There is no national production, there are no studies that prove the effectiveness and use of species from here. There is a lack of standardization in terms of control and quality of resources. Brazilian plants perhaps have basic studies.

We can understand the use of species in certain places. There are 12 species listed (for use) in the SUS, but they are not distributed throughout Brazil and are not used homogeneously. There is regionalization.

Another barrier is the discontinuity of programs. Government comes and goes, and the way of doing politics also changes.

One of humanity’s biggest challenges today is climate change. How can this knowledge contribute to this scenario?
The connectivity between the ecosystem and human health is very interesting. The terreiro communities, where I worked for many years, have practices associated with temporality. In other words, there is a certain period of the year for harvesting plants, for example. We also noticed that they have an idea that environmental factors can influence both the chemical characteristics of species and their morphological development.

We know that environmental factors are changing. It’s an emergency. The plant is a living being. For some communities, a spiritual being. If there are changes in the environment, it will feel it — it will be impacted by heat, cold, rain, and respond chemically to this. Then the components will be changed.