Native Medicinal Ethnobotany of Central Coastal California: the Healing Herbs Used by Ohlone Native Americans

With a history of eight thousand years of empirical experimentation, it's likely that at least some of the medicinal plants utilized by the Ohlone provided true relief from illness. Here is a presentation of what is known of these uses, arranged in conceptual categories, along with discussions of the relevance of ancient ethnobotanical knowledge to the modern world. The author - a practicing physician - provides an argument for why further biochemical, pharmacological, and clinical study of such ethnobotanical therapies would be useful. He asks: What if many of these plants or simple extracts of these plants were indeed scientifically proven to be unequivocally beneficial to human health? Is it possible that substantial benefits would accrue to public health and to environmental health, as a result of improved access and affordability, and from favorable agroecological characteristics of regionally native medicinal plants?