Improvised Hand Injury Treatment Using Traditional Veterinary Medicine in Ethiopia

In remote wilderness environments, local people with traditional knowledge of medicinal plants are potentially important first-line health care providers. We present a case of a 31-year-old man who fell off a horse while trekking through a remote mountain landscape in Ethiopia and sustained blunt force trauma to the hand. A local mountain hut keeper examined the patient's hand and used heated leaves of the succulent plant Kalanchoe petitiana to treat a suspected metacarpal fracture. As first responder in a low-resource setting, the hut keeper relied on his traditional knowledge of ethnoveterinary medicine to improvise a treatment for a human injury in a remote mountain environment. Although in this case the outcome of the traditional intervention was positive, our analysis shows that the massage component of the intervention could have led to complications. Conversely, reports from the use of related Kalanchoe species suggest that heated Kalanchoe leaves could be useful in the compression component of traditional care for hand injuries. Validation of traditional remedies and their therapeutic potential are needed if they are to complement wilderness wound care safely and reliably. The documentation and validation of these remedies are urgently needed, as many medicinal plants and indigenous knowledge of how to use these valuable natural resources are being lost.