People of the forest pharmacy: inside the secret medicine of the Bunong

East of the Mekong, in the red hills of Mondulkiri, lives Cambodia's largest indigenous community. The Bunong never had a “spa-ready” medicine to sell to tourists — they have a survival pharmacopoeia, passed down in a low voice, one that scientific research is only now beginning to touch.

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There is no tourist brochure for Bunong medicine. No signature massage, no compress packaged for a Siem Reap spa. What healers in Mondulkiri practice belongs to a different register: a forest pharmacopoeia, shaped by two thousand years of self-sufficient life in Cambodia's northeastern highlands, one that researchers themselves describe as diverse, dynamic and often deliberately secretive. Unlike the lowland Kru Khmer tradition, widely documented and now reinterpreted by the wellness industry, Bunong knowledge never sought the spotlight. It has largely survived in spite of itself — which is exactly what makes it one of the most fragile, and least understood, corners of Cambodian traditional medicine.

A medicine born of isolation, broken by war

The Bunong, also known as Phnong, form Cambodia's largest indigenous minority — roughly 37,000 people by linguistic self-identification, concentrated in Mondulkiri and, to a lesser extent, Ratanakiri. Their language belongs to the Bahnaric family, unrelated to Khmer, and their cosmology remains fundamentally animist: every river, mountain and ancient tree is thought to house a spirit — brah-yaang — with whom one must negotiate, through ritual, offerings of jar wine, sometimes animal sacrifice. Illness, in this framework, is never a simple biological accident: it unfolds as a negotiation with the invisible world, which partly explains why Bunong healing draws as much on ritual as on pharmacology.

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This knowledge nearly disappeared. In the 1970s, wartime upheaval forced entire Bunong communities to flee to Vietnam or to Cambodia's Koh Nhek district, severing the oral transmission chain on which this medicine entirely depends — by definition, no written text exists to fall back on. What is known today about Bunong pharmacopoeia rests almost entirely on the work of a handful of field researchers: a first inventory of 24 antimalarial plants in the 1990s, followed by a broader survey recording 130 medicinal species in the early 2000s. Each of these studies had to patiently reconstruct knowledge that the next generation risked losing altogether.

202 villagers, 28 villages, and a species unknown to science

The most comprehensive survey to date was carried out between 2013 and 2014: 202 residents interviewed across 28 villages in the province's five districts, using two complementary methods — field surveys conducted directly in the forest alongside villagers, and semi-structured household interviews focused on the eleven most common ailments in the region: wounds, fever-related colds, cough, sprains, stomachache, headache, diarrhea, burns, backache, malaria, and a period considered especially at risk — the postpartum period, during which mothers receive specific care.

The findings go well beyond a simple ethnobotanical inventory. Researchers documented the combined use of plants, mushrooms and medicinal animals — a holistic therapeutic approach in which plants are only one component. And the forests of Mondulkiri yielded a surprise few surveys of this kind produce: a species entirely new to botanical science, since named Ardisia mondulkiriensis, along with the second confirmed record of another recently described species, Solanum sakhanii. Two scientific discoveries born, quite literally, from a conversation with a village healer.

Preparations of near-clinical precision

What stands out in the detail of Bunong preparations is their specificity. For respiratory ailments — coughs, colds, asthma — practitioners combine warm calamondin decoctions, baths with boiled medicinal leaves, and full steam-bath rituals: a complete therapeutic regimen rather than a single remedy. For a sprain, the logic shifts: leaves and roots are left to macerate in water together with areca palm seeds before being applied to the joint — a two-ingredient protocol in which each component plays a distinct role.

Illustration Photo only — © Cambodge Mag

Velvet tamarind (Dialium cochinchinense, known as kalagn in the Bunong language) illustrates this intimate relationship between the people and their environment: the tree, now threatened by deforestation in Mondulkiri itself, remains a pillar of local pharmacopoeia — a reminder that the survival of this knowledge depends directly on the survival of the forest that carries it.

A medicine with no safety net, but not without proof

The full body of knowledge extends well beyond the eleven priority ailments: altogether, the Bunong draw on 214 plants, one mushroom and 22 animal species to treat 51 different conditions, with roots being the most commonly used plant part and decoction the dominant method of preparation. Most species recorded for the most common ailments have since been at least partially validated by modern pharmacology — a level of convergence that led the study's authors to recommend integrating several of these plants into public health programs. Ten additional species were even reported as medicinal for the first time, proof that the gap between vernacular knowledge and scientific literature remains vast.

Postpartum care: a double-edged period

It is precisely in postpartum care that Bunong medicine reveals its limits. In Cambodia, these practices traditionally aim to prevent “toas,” a physical and psychological condition feared after childbirth — and among the remedies used is a porcupine-stomach maceration in rice alcohol. A recent study of Cambodian women living with hepatitis B found a clear statistical link between consuming these traditional macerations and an increased risk of acute liver injury, with two of the plants involved containing compounds known for their hepatotoxicity. A useful reminder: this knowledge deserves to be documented and respected — not necessarily reproduced without discernment.

What remains to be saved

The study's authors reach a clear-eyed conclusion: despite the considerable upheavals the community has endured, the Bunong have retained extensive medicinal knowledge — knowledge that depends almost entirely on the preservation of their forest environment. Every hectare of forest lost in Mondulkiri is not only an ecological loss; it is potentially a plant, a preparation, a therapeutic gesture disappearing with it, never recorded anywhere but in a healer's memory. At a time when Cambodia is documenting and promoting its lowland Khmer medicinal heritage, that of the highlands remains a quiet emergency.