In Nepal’s high Himalayas, wild herbs Tibetan healers rely on are getting harder to come by.
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NEWSLETTER | APRIL 4, 2025
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GUNGDRUNG TSEWANG SHOWS me his plant repository, a large room crammed with plastic bags and bowls filled with herbs. Dressed for summer in a blue polo-shirt and black baseball cap, the 39-year-old sniffs a handful of drying leaves, and cheerily tells me they are almost ready to use in medicines. Images of colorful Tibetan deities hang on the walls. Dozens of sprigs of dried plants have been pinned to wooden paneling, their names labelled underneath in Tibetan, Nepali, and English.
Yungdrung is an amchi, a practitioner of Tibetan medicine — a traditional form of healing that has been practiced across the Tibetan plateau for over a thousand years. This room, adjoining his small clinic, is where he dries, cooks, grinds, and mixes the numerous flowers, leaves, roots, seeds, and barks that make up the herbal medicines he gives his patients.
The clinic is located in Dolpo, a remote and mountainous area in the upper part of northwestern Nepal’s Dolpa District. Most of Dolpo is above 3,500 meters in altitude, and almost every settlement here is separated from the next by a pass of over 5,000 meters…. Dolpo has few government services providing conventional healthcare.… As with many other remote Himalayan regions, the communities here, therefore, rely heavily on Tibetan medicine for most of their healthcare needs.
Yungdrung collects many of the plants he needs from the surrounding mountains…. However, over the last few years he has been encountering unprecedented challenges in sourcing many of these plants and fungi.
Many medicinal plants, herbs, and fungi are becoming scarcer and their habitats shifting upwards, Yungdrung says. Some species, he notes, have simply vanished from their usual habitats. He points to a photograph of a yellow flower tacked to the wall. “This herb, serme (Herpetospermum pedunculosum), a bitter herb, used to grow in nearby areas, but I have never seen it,” he says. “I’ve heard of many herbs that used to grow here but that I haven’t seen. This is a climate problem.”
But climate isn’t the only factor impacting these species.
Journalist Eileen McDougall writes about the double whammy of climate change and a growing interest in alternative medicine impacting the work of traditional healers who people in Nepal’s remote, high-altitude villages rely on for basic healthcare.
READ MORE
Photo by Eileen McDougall
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