Health care savings, naturally
For millions of people around the world, being sick doesn’t mean making a trip to the local pharmacy. Instead it means turning to the forest to provide a pharmacopeia of medicines to treat everything from tooth aches to chest pains. But while questions persist about whether such natural remedies are as effective as their pharmacological cousins, one Harvard researcher is examining the phenomenon from a unique perspective, and trying to understand the economic benefits people receive by relying on traditional cures. As reported in a paper published this week in PLoS ONE, Christopher Golden ’05, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, has found that in an area of northwest Madagascar, people annually extract between $5 to $8 in benefits from the forest by using natural medicines. Though seemingly slight, it adds up to between $30 and $45 per household, Golden said, or anywhere from 43 to 63...