[Radim]

     the shaman in order to learn from the plant what his patient illness is and how to go about healing it.

And how was that working out for them, from what you could see? Did patients there prefer the "traditional" or the "western" medicine?

[dnc]

I was not long enough to make any general conclusions, but from what I could see it is a mixture. I saw quite a few 'westerners' who had given up 'western' medicine and came to try Ayahuasca for various reasons. As for natives, I don't know, I think they still go to traditional healers, but also very rapidly adopt 'western lifestyle'. I'm sure 'western' medicine is not an exception from this trend. Ayahuasca still seems to be deeply ingrained in their culture and original religion (which is a sort of spiritual pantheism for the lack of a better term), it is considered holly plant and still deeply revered and respected. Personally, I would not like to see this tradition they have preserved for millennia to disappear or completely mutates into something like "Ayahuasca turism"...

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. That argument leads nowhere new and therefore nowhere interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: whoops I misread that one and broke the site rules in the process. Sorry and carry on!

[borski]

dang, apologies, but the parent didn't seem to be taking this on a generic tangent. The OP has a very interesting anecdotal story to tell, related directly to a group of people that take ayahuasca for healing, and I, too, am curious about how it worked for them, specifically.

[dang]

Uh oh, on a proper reading I see that you're right. Thanks for pointing it out.

I overhastily ascribed the comment to the "western medicine, you mean real medicine?" meme that doesn't belong here. Perils of pattern-matching. Retracted!