TREATMENT FOR AN EYE DISEASE
Pilocarpine is used to treat glaucoma.
Photo by Steven R. King, 1996.
If you hold the leaf of the jaborandi tree (Pilocarpus jaborandi) up to the light, you see translucent droplets on its surface. Each droplet is a gland that secretes an alkaloid-rich oil.
Several substances are extracted from this aromatic oil, including the alkaloid pilocarpine, a weapon against the blinding disease glaucoma.
The shrub-like jaborandi tree is native to Northern Brazil.
Brazilian folk medicine often uses a tea made from the leaves as a diuretic and sweat-inducer.
Applied to the scalp, it is said to prevent baldness.
An infusion of the powdered leaves has been used as a stimulant and expectorant in diabetes and asthma.
It has been incorporated into the treatment of a number of diseases including pleurisy (inflammation
of the lung tissue) and rheumatism (muscle and joint pain).
Pilocarpine assists in the transmission of impulses from the ends of autonomous nerves to the working muscles. These nerves trigger such functions as the beating of the heart and the focusing of the eye.
When applied to the eye of a person suffering from early stages of glaucoma, pilocarpine stimulates
the muscle that contracts the pupil to relieve eye pressure. Since the disease blinds by building up pressure until the eye can no longer function, pilocarpine can save eyesight.
Pilocarpine has found other medical applications as well.
At present, for example, it is used in tablet form, under the name Salegen, to treat xerostoma, or dry mouth syndrome.
Interestingly, in the Tupi Indian language, the name for the jaborandi is the "slobber-mouth plant," and its long-standing use in Brazil has been to induce salivation. Had we listened more closely to what the indigenous people of Brazil called their folk remedy and questioned its purposes in their medicinal storehouse of knowledge, the development of our dry-mouth syndrome product might have come years earlier.