Carlos Prado-Mendoza (Quri Mayu, native name)
Jampiri Quechua (Medicine man), self-taught, and amawta at the INKARI Andean Amazonian School of Medicine. Director of the Kuska Cultural Center and the Traveling Native Museum of Traditional Andean-Amazonian Medicine. Vice President of the Bolivian Society of Natural History and the Martín Cárdenas Foundation. In his role as guardian and heir to the legacy of Dr. Martín Cárdenas, he protects and preserves endemic and endangered medicinal plants in the Botanical Garden of Cochabamba, Bolivia. He was named as Sabedor (wisekeeper) in the Ikwashenduna Four Pillars Project (UNESCO) and at the First International Summit on Ancestral Spirituality of the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala. He also participated in the COP15 meeting. In 2023, in an open letter to the COP28 authorities, he presented evidence on the effectiveness of ancestral wisdom in traditional medicine in addressing the global health and climate crisis. He has written several books, including: “1000 Ways to Prevent and Cure Diseases” and “Mancharisqa is not depression. Ethnomedicine contribution to intercultural mental health,” which has been translated into Dutch and German and collected by relevant libraries such as the NIH and Stanford University. He has been a guest lecturer in postgraduate programs and has participated in conferences related to the fields of health, traditional intercultural medicine, nutrition, botany, and anthropology at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón (Bolivia), Ohio State University (USA), and the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). His contributions have also been included in intercultural medicine specialization programs (SAFCI). He has been recognized by the Senate of the Plurinational State of Bolivia for the relevance of his work in understanding, treating, and approaching health prevention from the perspective of ancestral wisdom. He is one of the few healers in Latin America whose ancestral knowledge and practices have been adopted in scientific research and therapeutic interventions within scientific commissions and mental health institutions such as the San Juan de Dios Psychiatric Hospital (Cochabambamba, Bolivia). He is currently the botanical garden design coordinator for the Maryknoll Mission Center and for indigenous communities in the Sud Yungas region (Bolivia), and he also collaborates as lecturer with the Wasiwaska Research Center (Brazil).
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