The Amazon

In this section, we follow doctors Adam O. Brown and Gabor Maté as they visit the Takiwasi center and learn about its program.

Takiwasi’s director Dr. Jacques Mabit arrived in Perú in the late 1980s to work for Doctors Without Borders. When he arrived, he found the locals already had their own doctors: curanderos, practitioners of traditional Amazonian medicine.  Dr. Mabit was faced with an entirely new medical system, with its own illnesses and diagnoses, and its own medicines: the plants from the world’s most biodiverse ecosystem.

The French doctor decided to investigate further. What he found would change his life forever, and lead to the creation of Takiwasi, a detox centre that uses the plants and methods of traditional Amazonian medicine to heal drug addicts.  Operating on the fringes of Western medicine and learning from indigenous healers. Mabit has spent more than twenty years building bridges between Western science and a system of medicine once thought “primitive.”

Interviews complied & edited by Jerónimo M.M.