Estudo etnobotânico de plantas medicinais na comunidade de Santa Rita, Ituiutaba – MG

This paper aimed to inventory the plants used in popular medicine by members of the rural community of Santa Rita, in the town of Ituiutaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The evaluation was carried out through interviews, with a semi-structured questionnaire and subsequent collection of the plants indicated by informants. One conducted 47 interviews and 127 species were listed, belonging to 55 Angiosperm families. For obtaining the quantitative data, one calculated the percentage of the Main Use Concordance (cMUC) of each species; for identifying the therapeutic indications with greater importance, one used the Informant Consensus Factor (ICF). The cMUC showed that 5.5% of the plants mentioned are widely used by the community. The predominant botanical families registered were Lamiaceae and Asteraceae, with 14 and 13 records, respectively. The indication of predominant use mainly involved illnesses related to an emotional disorder, as indicated by the ICF. One emphasizes that 60.7% of the plants mentioned in this paper are exotic species; thus, there’s a need for further studies in order to catalogue knowledge on the medicinal plants which are native to this region