Someone Asked About the Need for Curanderos in Ayahuasca Ceremonies

Someone on a forum on which I post occasionally questioned the need for a curandero in ceremony. The curandero is generally the person who makes and serves the ayahuasca and then runs the ceremony--which are generally very simple affairs. There were several responses to that person's question, most of which had to do with "you are your own healer" and the like. I put my two cents in and this is what I wrote:
The more one would tout themselves as being this or that type of curandero, the faster I'd run away from them. A banco (bench) curandero, for instance, is simply a curandero whose teachers have passed on but who are still available to help him/her--either through the memory of their teaching or through the gifts they gave him/her while alive or through some etheric trail they've left as a way to get in touch with their spirits once their bodies are gone. So that curandero, like a baseball manager, has a good bench to call on in the clutch.
    But I've always felt that the chemicals in ayahuasca have very little to do with anything. Oh, yes, you need to drink the medicine a few times to open up your invisible 'ayahuasca receptor sites', but after that, what really counts is your relationship to the spirit of those plants. Because it's the generosity of those spirits that can do the healing, not the chemicals. And someone who has been working at it for a long time, a curandero on a river somewhere who is that river's doctor for physical, emotional, spiritual ailments, might have made friends with a lot of different plant spirits who can help him/her diagnose what is wrong with the patient--and it's often very different from that the patient thinks is wrong--and then steer that curandero to the right plants or actions needed by the ill person to help with their cure.
    And the icaros, the songs the curanderos sing, are most frequently calling out to different spirits to come and help the work. They're not much if learned by rote, but very powerful if learned by sleeping with the plants or dieting them.
     I think the real question here is not whether a person drinking without a curandero, or drinking with a facilitator rather than a curandero will get some benefit: yes, they will. But if you add a curandero who has dozens of friendly plant spirits who can communicate with him/her, well, I think you would likely wind up with much more than you might otherwise. And that would be a real plus, and a reason to drink with a curandero if you had the chance.