Opinion | Kashmir’s Ancient Remedies in a Modern World

Tethwan, Kuth, Pushkarmool and Patrees have treated Kashmiri patients for centuries. Science is now testing their claims, and conservationists are counting what is left.

Above the tree line in Gurez, Kupwara and Pir Panjal, where snow lingers into May, a small group of plants grows slowly on thin soil. Local healers have known them for generations as Tethwan, Kuth, Pushkarmool and Patrees. Pharmacologists know them as Artemisia, Saussurea, Inula and Aconitum. Each has a long record in traditional practice, each has drawn laboratory attention in recent decades, and each is now under pressure from the demand it created.

Tethwan is the easiest to place. Artemisia absinthium, the wormwood of European herbals, grows widely on Kashmir’s slopes and roadsides, and its intense bitterness comes largely from absinthin. Village households have long used it for stomach upsets and intestinal worms, and hung dried bundles indoors to keep insects away. Its more famous relative made history far from the Valley. In 1972, Chinese scientist Tu Youyou isolated artemisinin from Artemisia annua, guided by a fourth-century Chinese text describing the plant as a fever remedy. She shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it. Artemisinin-based combination therapy is now the standard treatment for falciparum malaria, which caused an estimated 263 million cases and about 597,000 deaths in 2023, mostly in Africa, according to the WHO’s 2024 World Malaria Report. Kashmir’s wormwood is a different species of the same genus, and researchers are studying its antimicrobial and digestive properties

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uth, or Saussurea costus, has a harder story. Its thick, aromatic root grows at 2,500 to 3,500 metres and has been prized for centuries in Ayurveda, Unani medicine (where it is called Qust) and Chinese practice. Laboratory studies have examined its main compounds, costunolide and dehydrocostus lactone, for anti-inflammatory and anticancer effects, but these findings come from cell and animal experiments and do not amount to an approved therapy. Demand, meanwhile, was relentless. Wild roots were dug in vast quantities for incense, perfumery and medicine, and the harvest outpaced what the mountains could replace. The IUCN now classifies the species as critically endangered, and CITES lists it in Appendix I, restricting commercial international trade in wild material. To relieve the pressure, researchers at CSIR-IIIM Jammu and the Union Territory’s agricultural universities have developed cultivation protocols, allowing farmers to supply the market without stripping the alpine meadows.

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ushkarmool, Inula racemosa, follows a similar arc. Ayurvedic texts recommend the root for cough, breathlessness and chest pain, and modern studies have looked at its sesquiterpene lactones, alantolactone and isoalantolactone, for effects on airway inflammation, blood lipids and heart function. Several published animal studies report encouraging results, and some small clinical trials in India have examined it for angina and asthma. Larger and better designed trials are still needed before doctors can prescribe it with confidence. The plant takes several years to mature, and roots are harvested by uprooting the whole plant, which makes wild populations vulnerable. Regional conservation assessments have placed it among the threatened Himalayan medicinal species.

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atrees, known in Ayurveda as Atis and botanically as Aconitum heterophyllum, needs a careful introduction because its genus carries a dark reputation. Many aconites contain aconitine, a potent cardiac and nerve toxin, and deaths from careless use have been recorded across Asia and Europe. Patrees is different. Its tubers contain mainly atisine type alkaloids, which are far less toxic, and Ayurvedic physicians have used them in small, controlled doses for fever, diarrhoea and as a tonic for children. That contrast is exactly why the Paracelsus line fits here. The same genus can heal or harm depending on species, preparation and dose, and no one should attempt to collect or self-medicate with aconite roots. Wild populations of Aconitum heterophyllum have fallen sharply in the Himalaya, and conservation reviews rate it as endangered.

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

Paracelsus, sixteenth century physician

What binds the four plants is altitude, slow growth and the fact that the useful part is usually the root. A root cannot be taken without ending the plant’s life, and a plant that needs five or six years to flower cannot support heavy harvesting. Jammu and Kashmir holds well over a thousand medicinal species, according to floristic surveys, but only a fraction is cultivated. The rest are still collected from the wild by nomadic and village communities, often for prices that reflect little of the eventual market value.

Their relevance today is practical. The WHO’s 2019 Global Report on Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine found that 170 of its member states reported using some form of traditional medicine, and in 2022 the organisation opened its Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar, Gujarat, to bring research standards to the field. Drug discovery has also turned back to natural compounds. Artemisinin is the best-known example, but the search for new antimicrobials, at a time when resistance to existing antibiotics is rising, gives fresh reason to study plants that evolved chemical defenses at high altitude.

The policy response has been gradual. The National Medicinal Plants Board, set up in 2000 under the Ministry of AYUSH, funds cultivation, and the CSIR Aroma Mission, best known for the lavender farms of Bhaderwah in Doda, has shown that hill farmers can move into high value crops. The same approach could be extended to Kuth and Pushkarmool, provided seed material is certified, buyers pay fairly, and wild collection is regulated with the participation of the communities who know the slopes best. Standardisation is the other requirement. A root sold in a Srinagar market can vary widely in its active content depending on where and when it was dug, and patients deserve consistent quality.

There is a plain lesson in the sequence from Tu Youyou’s laboratory to a Kupwara hillside. Traditional knowledge does not replace clinical evidence, but it can direct researchers toward the plants worth testing. Kashmir’s high pastures hold a good deal of that knowledge, in the plants and in the people who have handled them for generations. Whether it survives will depend on what gets protected, cultivated and properly studied over the next decade.

SHEIKH NAZIR MEHDI The author is a writer,activist, analyst, educator, and environmentalist. He can be reached at -sheikhnazirmehdi@gmail.com