Background: Fever is a health disorder characterized by an increase in body temperature above normal, which almost everyone experiences. Therefore, the selection of fever is expected to provide an overview of how the knowledge of Sumatra ethnic communities in fever treatment is generally processed.
Methods: Research metadata of medicinal plants and jamu conducted by the Ministry of Health in 2012, 2015 and 2017 became the main sources. The study was conducted by interview and field observation methods to obtain medicinal plants. The informants of this study are traditional healers in every ethnic community in all provinces in Sumatra. Dummy tables containing provinces, ethnic, family, medicinal plants, potion numbers and traditional healersÂ’ codes were analyzed by Bray-Curtis similarity analysis based on the use of medicinal plants to obtain a level of similarity between ethnics and followed by scatterplots display using non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis.
Results: Medicinal plants usage by traditional healers in Sumatra has a low similarity among ethnic groups because the similarity index value to approximate zero. It shows that the group is quite specific in relation to the surrounding natural resources.
Conclusion: The low similarity index between ethnic groups in Sumatra shows that traditional medicinal knowledge among them is not interrelated. Their knowledge of developing hereditary based on experience and availability of natural resources around them.
Key words: Diversity, ethnomedicine, fever, local wisdom, similarity.
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