Ethnography and bioassay: combined methods for a preliminary screen of home remedies for potential pharmacological activity

This paper introduces a combined set of anthropological and biological research techniques that allow a single researcher to conduct a field-based screen of ethnopharmaceutical resources, even under difficult field conditions. The results of one such screen, presented here, indicate that the most commonly used remedies in an ethnomedical system are also those most likely to contain active constituents. Several pragmatic and theoretical considerations deriving from these results are discussed.