Amazon healthcare delves deep into the jungle’s ‘medicine cabinet’

He also resets broken bones, stitches wounds and attends births. But more than anything else, Mr Majipo treats his patients using a plethora of plants he collects from the surrounding rainforest.

Once or twice a week, he dons rubber boots, and with a machete and woven satchel, sets off into the jungle in search of leaves, vines, roots, bark and flowers whose medicinal applications his father, also a shaman, first taught him seven decades ago.

Long dismissed as superstitious mumbo-jumbo, these kinds of indigenous healing practices, especially their use of compounds taken from flora and fauna, are now increasingly being recognised by doctors and scientists as often – but not always – having genuine medical efficacy.

Although big pharma does not highlight it, up to half of modern medicines are derived from chemicals embedded in wild ecosystems. In some cases, they are directly harvested from nature and then processed. But in most, pharmaceutical companies now synthesise, in other words artificially recreate in the lab, compounds first identified in living organisms.

Examples include everything from aspirin, derived from willow bark, and Ace inhibitors, used to treat high blood pressure and developed from the venom of a South American viper, to chemotherapy drug vincristine, originating from the Madagascan periwinkle, to even modern GLP-1 weight loss drugs, based on substances first found in the saliva of a North American lizard.

Meanwhile, there is a growing body of research affirming how ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic Amazonian vine in vogue over the last decade to treat some mental health conditions, above all PTSD suffered by military veterans, really can rewire traumatised brains.

No region has more medicinal promise than the Amazon basin, the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspot, home to 10 per cent of all known plant and animal species, many of them endemic, meaning they can only be found here.