Unrobed and undercover, I recently gave a talk in a secret Amsterdam basement to a group of researchers engaged in the academic study of ayahausca.

My point was that clinicians, therapists and anthropologists should take note of how traditional practitioners work with ayahuasca, and pay attention to what is considered important in the Amazon. Doing that, we might avoid the mistakes of the nineteenth century medics who investigated Chinese medicine and hypnosis with their own limited tools and concepts, ignoring reports of hundreds of individuals cured of diphtheria, and hundreds of cases of amputation under hypnosis.