Mayan Medicine Essay

traditional medicine by Mayan people (Wynberg 2009). This bioprospecting program has upset and outraged people in Chiapas who claim that their indigenous knowledge and resources are being stolen (Wynberg 2009). People who worked and led this project took knowledge from the people of Chiapas and took plant samples with almost nothing in return (Wynberg 2009). This biopiracy and bioprospecting is something that really hurts medicinal healers in the Mayan areas, but it doesn’t stop them from practicing or letting these big pharmaceutical companies get in the way. Today, Mayan priests and healers can be found in both the lowlands and highlands of Mayan communities (Foster 2005:337). For example, there is a man by the name of Victorio Vasquez who …show more content…
It’s unfortunate to see another civilization collapse among other cultures and for people and their practices and rituals to be non-existent anymore in this day and time, but fortunately the Mayan people are still active and practice certain rituals and healings. But anthropologists and historians and among other scholars are still deciphering new findings on lands where the Mayan people walked and we continue to learn more about the Mayan people and who they were as people, etc. It’s sort of unknown how the Mayan people came to a disappearance, which there are several factors that could answer this question. Some say that it was due to environmental causes such as exhaustion of the soil which could’ve been caused by the massive growth of the Mayan people (Foster 2005). Some might say that it was due to a catastrophic event like a volcano eruption or warfare or disease (Foster 2005). But regardless of the reasoning of their collapse, the Mayan people are still alive and well, and their herbal medicinal practices are still being used and