Traditional Amazonian medicine in addiction treatment: Qualitative results

Introduction

Substance use and addictive disorders remain difficult-to-treat contributors to global disease burden, in part because their aetiology is contested and they commonly co-occur with other disorders. Over the past decade psychedelic therapies have re-emerged as promising interventions for addictions, and parallel interest has grown around long-standing Indigenous plant-based practices such as peyote and ayahuasca. One established centre using Amazonian techniques in addiction care is the Takiwasi Centre in Peru, which integrates Peruvian vegetalismo (a shamanic healing tradition), Christian elements, psychotherapeutic work, community living, occupational therapy, and intermittent biomedical evaluation. Treatment at Takiwasi is prolonged (ideal duration around nine months) and staged, with purgative plant remedies used during early detoxification, followed later by ayahuasca sessions and dietary retreats (dietas) intended to address physical, psycho-emotional, and spiritual domains. O'Shaughnessy and colleagues set out to provide qualitative context for within-treatment patient experiences at Takiwasi, complementing previously published within-treatment quantitative findings from the same programme. Rather than offering a full ethnography, the study aimed to capture which elements of the integrated Amazonian treatment were most salient to inpatients and how they reported therapeutic change or difficulty while resident at the centre. The authors therefore focused on patients' accounts of ayahuasca sessions, purges and diets, and broader changes in behaviour, emotion and social functioning during their stay.