Mother nature supplies the right medicine for ailments

In a small store in North Point, a slim Indonesian secretary confided: 'I do not need artificial slimming pills to keep slender. I take jamu galian singset twice a week with honey and lemon juice.' For a tired businessman customer, the fatigue remedy he sought was jamu temulawak. 'It helps me a lot after a hard day,' he said.

Despite the availability of Western pharmaceuticals in Indonesia, the use of traditional 'jamu' medicine is widespread and growing - to the extent that it is even exported to Indonesian communities abroad.

In Hong Kong a range of these natural remedies are on sale at Toko Surabaya and Toko Liem, two popular stores selling Indonesian foodstuffs in King's Road.

'Even though the country is rapidly modernising and allopathic medicines and doctors are easily available, people are reverting to the use of their well trusted jamu,' Kim Worm Sorensenn said. Mrs Sorensenn is a consultant for a joint WWF-UNESCO project on traditional plant use in the archipelago.

'Regular popular television programmes on the use of medicinal plants bolster the trend,' she said.

The total number of medicinal plant species growing in Indonesia is not known. One estimate by Indonesian scientists maintained the forests may contain as many as 9,606 such species.

In a 1986 study, leading pharmaceutical company P. T. Elsal Indonesia listed 3,689 species. Most recently it emerged that native people can identify and use as many as 1,260 healing plants.