Some “wellness practitioners” are peddling a new kind of detox: dabbing the poisonous secretions of an Amazonian tree frog onto your skin. With potentially life-threatening results.
Last weekend, Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach from Leicester, died after reportedly using kambo, the frog poison that has long been a traditional medicine among some Indigenous people. “He is believed to be the first British victim,” said The Times. But at least six deaths worldwide have been associated with the substance.
‘Incredible but brutal’
Kambo is harvested from the defensive skin secretions of the giant monkey tree frog. In traditional Amazonian rituals, it is “applied to superficial burns”, made on the legs or arms, to produce “an intense purging effect”, said Martin Williams of Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, on The Conversation. Self-styled “kambo practitioners” tout a range of supposed benefits, including reduced anxiety, increased energy and relief from chronic pain.
Many users “anecdotally report positive physical, emotional and spiritual after-effects”. Actor Orlando Bloom told GQ magazine that kambo had left him with a “feeling of being clearer and wide open”. He described the purge as “incredible”. However, “it was pretty brutal in terms of what it does to the body in the moment”. It was “coming out both ends”.
‘Danger to health’
Using kambo can have severe health consequences. It can lead to hyperthermia and dangerously low sodium levels, inducing psychiatric effects that are “often misinterpreted by participants as ‘astral travel’, instead of being recognised as potentially fatal conditions”, according to a paper published last year in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science. It’s concerning that kambo is so widely available on the internet, said the study authors, as this could contribute “to an uncontrolled increase in fatalities”.
In Brazil, it’s illegal to sell or market kambo. In Australia, where there have been two deaths after kambo rituals, it is categorised as a “substance of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”. In the UK, Trend’s mother and several MPs are now calling for a ban.
Indigenous healers have used these substances for hundreds of years, and they “have been trained” to do so safely for “certain, specific situations”, Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist at Adelaide University, told The Guardian. To think we can “take one of their time-honoured, cultural practices” for our own use is “absolute Western arrogance”. |
