Easy Access to Biomedicine and Knowledge about Medicinal Plants: A Case Study in a Semiarid Region of Brazil

Abstract

We aimed to evaluate how proximity to urban areas interferes with the relationship between socioeconomic variables and various aspects of medicinal plant knowledge. The study was conducted in six communities of the Catimbau National Park (PARNA Catimbau) in the state of Pernambuco. Eighty participants were interviewed. The communities were divided into two groups according to their distance from the nearest urban center. Socioeconomic data and information on medicinal plants were collected through semistructured interviews. Subsequently, generalized linear models were generated to verify the influence of the interaction between the variables on medicinal knowledge. We observed that proximity to the urban center influenced the relationship between the level of education and the knowledge of body systems treated by medicinal plants. We concluded that environmental variables can generate a differentiated effect on the influence of socioeconomic factors on one’s knowledge of medicinal plants.