An Exploratory Study on Factors Influencing the Decreasing Use of Ethnomedicine Among Indigenous Khasi Tribe in Bangladesh: A Qualitative Approach

This study aims to assess the institutional, social, individual, and environmental factors associated with the decreasing use of ethnomedicine among Khasi indigenous people. This qualitative study was conducted from January 2021 to December 2021 in two Khasi villages in Bangladesh. We conducted 48 informal conversations, 15 in-depth interviews, and five key informant interviews, with ongoing observations during fieldwork. Through the narrative of native people, several factors, such as institutional, social, cosmological beliefs, individual, and environmental factors, are associated with the decreasing use of ethnomedicine among Khasi indigenous people. Institutional factors include social forestation, land occupation for tea gardens, and land occupation for the reserve forest; social factors include cosmological belief, religious belief, trustworthiness, and longitude of medical care; individual factors influence education, medical accuracy, individual belief, and shortages of healers; environmental factors include the emergence of new diseases and losing therapeutic plants. Ethnomedicine could be a vital source of remedies for novel diseases (virus and bacteria-associated diseases). However, the matter of concern is that the use and significance of therapeutic plants are decreasing gradually. The results underscore the urgency of documenting ethnopharmacological data to conserve therapeutic plants, and clinical tests of therapeutic plants are needed to build trust in ethnomedicine.