Medicinal Plants Used by Traditional Practitioners in Two Selected Barangays of Iligan City: Basis for Crafting an Educational Pamphlet

Abstract

Traditional practitioners use their conventional knowledge to treat many diseases, and they use plants as the main source of medicine.  However, a growing number of elderly practitioners are dying without their knowledge with undocumented and it has not been successfully passed from generation to generation. Rural communities have admitted that their understanding of the herbal plant's population was less than that of the preceding generation. Leading the ethnomedicinal knowledge to deteriorate because of the poor to no medicinal knowledge of the younger generation. This study aims to assess the knowledge and the utilization of medicinal plants used by traditional practitioners in two selected barangays of Iligan City, Lanao del Norte. The purposive random sampling technique was used to identify traditional practitioners (manghihilot/mananabang). Thus eleven (11) traditional practitioners served as key informants of the study. The study used a descriptive survey approach. Furthermore, the number of documented medicinal plants is 54 species and their uses exhibited a promising profundity of the local traditional practitioners’ knowledge of medicinal plants and their significance in treating ailments/diseases. 31 ailments/diseases are identified that it can cure, most of it was taken orally to alleviate the specified ailment/disease it can treat. This study has added more to the existing discoveries of relevant medicinal plant species as well as served as a survey to assert if the already recorded medicinal plants still exist today. This will be beneficial to the young generation to be knowledgeable about the medicinal plants in their natural form and administer them traditionally, and not just know about the medicinal plants in their capsule form.