Adventures in Healing

By Christopher Cox

This story appeared in the
12/29/03 Boston Herald

UMass teacher scours globe to discover herbal remedies

Chris Kilham has feasted on fried scorpions, swum with piranhas and repeatedly hot-footed through fire walks - all in the name of science.

"If you can't run with the big dogs, you can't do the work," said Kilham, 51, the explorer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who spends much of his time searching the world for new medicinal plants.

"Eighty-five percent of the world's population uses plants as primary medicine," said the Leverett resident. "It's only considered 'alternative' here in the states."

According to Kilham, 40 percent of the pharmaceuticals currently in use - everything from quinine to morphine to taxol - originally were derived from plants.

"When I was a kid a lot of children died from childhood leukemia," Kilham said. "Now, because of a compound, vincristine, derived from Madagascar periwinkle, a majority survive. This isn't alternative medicine; this is hospital pharmacology."

Unlike ethnobotanists such as Wade David ("The Serpent and the Rainbow"), the Boston native has no formal training in the field. A former marketing director for Bread & Circus, the health-food chain, the longtime devotee of yoga and meditation took a "bootstrap" approach, studying the work of earlier explorers and experts on medicinal plants.

Kilham's chance came in 1995, when he convinced Pure World Inc., a New Jersey herbal company, to send him to the islands of Vanuatu, a small South Pacific republic, to develop a source of kava, which is derived from the root of an Oceania pepper plant.

Thanks in part to Kilham's efforts, kava exploded on the herbal-remedies market as a "natural" alternative to anti-anxiety drugs such as Valium and Xanax.

Kilham said he isn't interested in simply delivering a moneymaking product.

"My job is to accomplish three things," he said. "To deliver healing benefits to the market, to help preserve the natural environment by keeping areas agriculturally based and also to enhance living conditions for indigenous people."

In gratitude, the nation of Vanuatu - where kava became a multimillion-dollar product - named Kilham its honorary consul to the United States.

His travels have taken him to Siberia, the Amazon and the Himalayas, and brought meals of goose heads and shots of snake liquor.

"It's fulfilling, satisfying work," said Kilham, who teaches "The Shaman's Pharmacy" at UMass-Amherst. "But I also get the s--- scared out of me."

Kilham meets with botanists and chemists, physicians and government officials as well as jungle traders and shamans.

"Many medicine men and women don't have apprentices or students.   A great deal of knowledge is being lost, especially in tribal situations. Part of the job of botanists is to catch at least some of that knowledge before it's gone," he said.

Another frustration is the bottom-line focus of pharmaceutical companies.

"Medicine in the U.S. is based entirely on patent law now," Kilham said.   "Without a patent position, in this country no one will put in development dollars on the pharmaceutical side. These products wind up becoming herbal supplements."

Some of the plants he scouts, such as Siberian red root, which apparently enhances prostate health, are too rare to be commercially viable.

"There's no point in promoting something that'll be endangered immediately," Kilham said.

His upcoming book, "Hot Plants," offers the vegetable kingdom's answers to Viagra.   The work will describe 10 sex-enhancing plants Kilham has researched around the world, including tongkat ali, the root of a Malaysian rain-forest tree; maca, a turniplike root cultivated in the Peruvian highlands; and zallouh, the root of a plant grown on the mountainous border of Syria and Lebanon.

Kilham has traveled boldly to study, and consume, these medicinal plants.

"I'm 51 years old," he said.  "I use them often. Let's get real. You live the kind of lifestyle we have - on jets and in hotels - like anyone else, I need a boost."