PRESERVING OUR TRADITIONAL WAYS
As part of our Female Leadership series, Life talks to Supaporn Pitiporn, the chief pharmacist of Chao Phraya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital, about her devotion to the development of traditional Thai medicine
Apassion for knowledge has driven Supaporn Pitiporn to do things beyond the basic duty of a pharmacist. During the past 30 years, she has trekked through forests or climbed mountains to meet moh ya phuenban, or folk healers, in remote villages, where she has learned and recorded formulas for remedies of herb-based drugs within and outside the country. Supaporn is one of a very few pharmacists in Thailand who can combine knowledge of traditional healers with her skills in modern science to produce a wide range of ready-to-use herbal medicines.
“I will never have any excuse to stop myself from doing things that I intend to do. As long as I know it is good, I’ll go for it,” she said.
Supaporn, 57, is the chief pharmacist of Chao Phraya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital in Prachin Buri province. She is also the brains behind the success of the Abhaibhubejhr brand of herbal medicines.
Born and growing up in a poor farmer family in Nakhon Nayok, Supaporn is the descendant of Lao people who settled in Siam during the reign of King Rama III. Her father was a rice farmer, and to make ends meet, he also worked manual labour after the harvesting season.
In primary school, she rode a bicycle 3km every day to school, and she did not mind the teasing from her classmates when some days she showed up for class with dirty feet. She was an A student.
With hopes for a better future for their bright daughter, her parents moved the family to Bangkok when Supaporn was in her early teens. Her mother, a fine cook of northern-style food, opened a food stall. Supaporn would wake up early to help her mother prepare food while going to sleep late due to her studies.
After graduating in pharmacy from Mahidol University in 1983, Supaporn applied for the job at Chao Phraya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital, a public hospital near her hometown. Although the salary was low, she managed to support her parents and sent her younger brother to school (he is now a doctor at the same hospital). Supaporn earned a doctorate in social sciences and humanities from the same university in 2003.
As a pharmacist, she worked in a lab producing basic herbal medicines for the hospital. Her day-to-day work did not involve working with communities. However, she was interested in helping people in need since she was the university student. She then joined the social medicine department of the hospital to train nearby villagers about herbal medicine.
With the naive bravado of youth, she taught them herbal knowledge she learned from the university. Little did she knew that what she learned in class was a far cry from the years-long knowledge of old villagers.
So it was she who learned from them. Soon she found her first two mentors of herbal healing, the late Bunmee Dairoek, or Pho Mao, and the late Suan Simaphrik, or Ta Suan. During her early working years, she spent her weekends in the forest of Khao Yai and followed either Pho Mao or Ta Suan to pick herbal plants and try herbal remedies.
She was amazed to see them greet trees like they greeted familiar people. They prayed before picking any herbal plants and paid respects to guardians of the forest. She also learned the techniques and quietly prayed for the guardians and asked for blessings before she took leaves, roots or any herbs from the forest.
She jotted down every detail while walking in the forest with the folk healers. The hunger for knowledge led her to meet more traditional healers, most of them elderly living in remote areas like Mae Hong Son in the North, Yasothon in the Northeast, the three provinces in the South or to Shan State in Myanmar.
“The more I learned, the more I realised that I knew so little,” she said.
She was also afraid that the old wisdom would disappear with the old healers. Supaporn developed a determination to visit as many herbal healers as possible to record the traditional remedies and compile the information before they are all gone.
She has received plenty of support from traditional healers. Some of them gave her handwritten records of their herbal formulas, which she keeps in the exhibition room in Abhaibhubejhr Thai Traditional Medicine Museum.
During the past 30 years of meticulously keeping records and exploring, she has penned 10 books in the series Banthuek Khong Phandin ( Records Of The Land). The books are a compendium of herbs, how to use or to avoid, side effects plus the list of herb healers, friends and people who have worked with her through the years.
“Throughout my career, I think I have collected only 50% of the old healing wisdom. A lot of traditional medical knowledge died with the old healers. Only about 700 medical herbs have been recorded so far,” she said.
Still there are much unrecorded lore and long forgotten remedies that makes Supaporn want to turn every stone to uncover. Her vision is to have Thai people rely on local wisdom more than paying for expensive, imported modern medicine.
THE BEGINNING OF THE BRAND
In 1986, Supaporn was asked by a paediatrician at her hospital to find a herbal remedy to treat child patients with oral herpes, which causes painful sores on lips, gums, tongue, inside cheeks and roof of mouth.
At that time there was no modern medicine to apply inside the kid’s mouth. Supaporn knew that folk healers use phaya yo, also known as saled phangphon tua mia ( Clinacanthus nutans) to treat herpes and shingles. She once conducted an experiment on a lip salve prototype with a group of teenagers who had oral herpes when they took part in an environmental camp she helped organise in Khao Yai National Park.
The Clinacanthus nutans glycerine she developed for the students had a positive result.
“The success of the first herbal medicine made me confident in our traditional wisdom,” she said in recalling that first success 32 years ago.
Since then, other traditional herbs were processed into modern drugs such as fa thalai jone ( Andrographis paniculata) capsules, which is used in Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine as a treatment for the flu and sore throat, phet sangkhat ( Cissus quadrangularis) capsules for curing haemorrhoids, makham pom or Indian gooseberry ( Emblic myrabolan) cough syrup and turmeric capsules. Around 2000, herbal medicine was listed in the national healthcare system, complying with a request by the World Health Organization’s Health For All strategy.
When the country was hit by economic crisis in 1997, there was more demand for affordable alternative medicine, and belief in herbal drugs was also on the rise. The hospital launched a project to help those who lost their jobs including training in traditional Thai massage as well as training sessions to promote organic farming methods for local villagers to supply the herbs for the hospital.
Today Abhaibhubejhr Hospital has more than 10 networks of certified organic farmers throughout the nation. Among them is the Ban Dong Bang community in Prachin Buri, which today is a well-known tourist attraction for those interested in growing and using common backyard plants for health benefits.
From its humble beginnings, the small R&D room for herbal medicines expanded into a modern factory. At present, the facility was certified with the international Good Manufacturing Practice standard based on the Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme.
The hospital has become a learning centre for alternative treatment. More than 35,000 visitors a year visit the factory, learn about herbs in the hospital’s herbal garden, visit the museum, enjoy Thai massage in its spa facility — which also features a spa training centre — and have healthy food in its health cuisine.
THE MORE I LEARNED, THE MORE I REALISED THAT I KNEW SO LITTLE
Today the herbal remedies of Abhaibhubejhr have expanded from herbal drugs to herbal drinks and products for daily care such as toothpaste, mouthwash and shampoo. They also produce cosmetics including anti-dark spot serum, facial sunscreen and anti-ageing serum, and animal care products.
The products yield a fruitful revenue for the hospital, starting from several million baht in 1997 to more than 300 million baht today.
“I never thought that I would one day have to operate machines or sell anything because I do not like it. But my friend told me that if I was confident about the quality of my products, why not let other people use them,” she said.
The earnings go to hospital operations (70%) and the remaining 30% goes to the Chao Phraya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital Foundation to fund R&D and support a wide range of social enterprise campaigns, such as supporting farmers, training villagers and holding youth camps.
“The success of the Abhaibhubejhr brand is the result of the right mixtures of the wisdom of traditional healers, my pharmaceutical and academic background, the help of friends and my team as well as the support of my bosses [the hospital directors] since the first day I started working here. I am very lucky,” she said.
UPLIFTING THE USE OF HERBAL MEDICINE
Supaporn has won more than 10 national awards for her devotion to reviving traditional Thai medicine. Among her laurels is the success in founding the College of Abhaibhubejhr Thai Traditional Medicine with the co-operation of Burapha University in 2005. (The name was changed to the Faculty of Abhaibhubejhr Thai Traditional Medicine in 2008.)
Her ambition is to upgrade the whole process of herbal medicine from upstream to downstream, or from the farms to consumers. It is a project that requires co-operation among universities, science and technology institutes, farmers and policymakers.
For the upstream process, she wants to work with science or innovation institutes that can find the best variety of each plant to develop the DNA database.
For example, she said, rang khokham ( Crinum latifolium) is used in folk medicine for treating prostate cancer. The plant has eight varieties. There is a need to find out which variety of the plant gives the highest amount of alkaloid extract. Then make the DNA bar code of the type and find out the suitable way and location to plant and harvest it. The R&D should be extended to co-operation with other countries. Together it will help upgrade the standardisation of traditional medicine, she said.
“This concept will be [as modern as] what they do at Silicon Valley, but this one is designed for health, traditional herbal medicines and herbs,” she said.
At least three projects will be launched in Prachin Buri. The first project is the Museum of Traditional Healers, which will open in September. Located in tambon Hat Yang, or about 12km south from the hospital, the museum will have a facility for training people in herbal medicine and producing herbal products. The second project is the learning centre for organic farming and health care in tambon Bang Decha. The third project is the Abhaibhubejhr health complex in Khao Yai, which will be a onestop service for herbal medicine. There also will be facilities for R&D in traditional medicine, a traditional health centre for elderly people and a large herbal garden, with more than 2,000 species of herbal plants and trees. The health complex will be a model to create three other healthcare centres in Chiang Rai, Sakon Nakhon and Surat Thani.
“I have never thought that I would come this far. When I look back, I am always happy. Although I do not know what lies ahead, I believe when I have the right direction, I will reach the goal,” she said.