Ethnopharmacology, sustainable development and cooperation: the importance of gathering clinical data during field surveys.

This commentary aims to focus, among the “multiple roles of ata generated in ethnopharmacological field studies” (Heinrich t al., 2009, p. 1), on the systematic collection of clinical data. ven if this issue may somewhat resemble what has long been aid (Martin, 1996), recent experiences with clinical assessment f the effectiveness of medicinal plants may shed some new light. his commentary is also a call for better cooperation between thnopharmacologists, physicians, traditional healers and the poplations concerned: that is the condition for ethnopharmacological ork to be useful at the level of local populations and, if included n a development project, for the design of sound health policies Elisabetsky and Nunes, 1990). A common research process is to go from field survey to phyochemistry, with the idea that the research can contribute to conomic development if a new drug can eventually be found and arketed while appropriate and ethical relationships are mainained with the owners of the traditional knowledge (ten Kate and aird, 2002). However, the road to development of a new drug is xcessively long, even in the rare cases where it is successful (e.g. oodia gordonii: see van Heerden, 2008). In the example of a phyochemical and pharmacological review on Garcinia mangostana, he authors concluded that “a serious weakness in our knowledge s the lack of clinical data and it is not yet clear to what extent the ndings about pharmacological activities are of potential clinical elevance” (Obolskiy et al., 2009, p. 1047). In the meantime, local traditional treatments continue to be sed. In our experience, local users are always interested in the esults of ethnopharmacology research and insist on the systemtic organisation of restitution sessions. They are interested in the nalysis of clinical data collected during the surveys, because it proides indices of treatment quality and has implications for local