Tribal societies provide health care and practices to their members with traditional medicines, imbued within the indigenous knowledge system. They use various parts of trees and plants viz., roots, herbs, barks, leaves, flowers or fruits of the forests for the treatment of diseases since time immemorial. Such knowledge related to the use of medicine they have been obtaining from their earlier generation and shared within contemporary members. When the community members become sick, first of all treatment is occurred with their own knowledge system. In the critical cases , when the diagnosis is beyond their daily practices, the patients are taken to their medicine men known as Bhagat Baba in the local dialects. He is an expert in local conservation-cum-cultural practices with herbal medicine, based on norms, beliefs and rituals.
Here the Indigenous knowledge of folk medicine has been studied in the Madia Gonds dominating villages of Dhanora tehsil in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra state. The study has been conducted in various villages, which are selected in complete forest surroundings and predominantly inhabited by Madia Gond tribal’s. To understand such medicinal practices, the medicine men, Baba Bhagat and their elders of villages have been interviewed. The study tries to draw from the folk medicine of the Madia Gonds revolving around forest conservation and cultural practices, with special emphasis on successful utilization of natural resources
Thus their traditional knowledge and associated conservation-cum-cultural practices are playing an essential role in promoting forest conservation and towards sustainable development. Such kind of local healing practices by the tribal community can be contained within anthropological knowledge, practice and theory.
