ReviewPlants (Basel, Switzerland)2026
Between Leaves, Prayers, and Healing Hands: A Cross-Regional Scoping Review of Ritual Healers and Plant-Based Community Knowledge.
Review in Plants (Basel, Switzerland), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Plant-based healing practices integrate botanical resources, ritual speech, gesture, faith, spiritual mediation, protection, and social recognition within complex community systems of care. This cross-regional scoping review mapped the traceable literature on plant-based knowledge associated with benzedeiras, benzedores, rezadeiras, rezadores, and functionally analogous specialists. The formal scoping-review corpus comprised 54 records retrieved through structured database searches. A separate contextual layer of 132 supplementary records, identified through citation tracking and targeted searches using emic specialist terms, broadened interpretation but was not treated as methodologically equivalent to the PRISMA-derived corpus. Across the 186 analytical records, 74 harmonized specialist terms and 212 botanical entries associated with therapeutic, ritual, spiritual, or community-based practices were identified. The botanical matrix comprised 68 families and 166 genera, with Lamiaceae, Asteraceae, Solanaceae, and Fabaceae as the most represented families. The results reveal terminological diversity, regional asymmetries in documentation, and the predominance of broad labels alongside terms with greater emic density. Plants operate as pharmacological resources, ritual supports, spiritual mediators, instruments of protection, territorial markers, and performative elements of healing. These specialists should be understood as mediators of complex therapeutic systems. The findings represent the indexed and traceable supplementary literature analyzed and should not be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of ritual healing traditions worldwide.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.