Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
common ground in both systems that could be integrated to provide much-needed health care for
the community.
6
The World Health Organization (WHO) has indeed been engaged in programs to
integrate the two systems of medicine to provide more realistic, efficient, and cheaper health care
for developing countries. This integration is necessary in Africa since 70-80% of the population
lives in rural areas and depends on the more readily available and cheaper facilities of traditional
medicine.
It is more interesting to observe that even in urban communities most Africans still consult the
native healers secretly in the quiet of night, while others consult the traditional healers for very
serious or chronic illnesses that defy Western hospital treatment. What is needed is the study and
analysis of traditional healing methods by the orthodox or modern doctors and the reorientation of
the native medicine man or woman so that he or she realizes personal limitations and benefits from
the knowledge of other cultures and civilizations. This should lead to an integrated and improved
health care delivery system. While this integration will probably take time, the practitioners of the
two systems must, at least for now, accord recognition to each other. The traditional healer must
recognize the scientific and intellectual base of modern medicine, the precision and economy of its
treatment methods, and the use of surgery when drugs alone fail. The healer must somehow learn
to accommodate the idea of the role of germs in disease states and stop ascribing every ill health to
vague, mysterious, supernatural forces. On the other hand, the Western-trained doctor should also
concede that traditional medicine is the forerunner of modern medicine, and that it continuously
nurtures modern medicine with its vast treasure of ancient remedies. This Western-trained doctor
must recognize that there are areas of human existence, health, disease, and death that modern
medicine has either not mastered or is unable to understand properly. It is wrong to assess the tra-
ditional healing method in compartments: isolating the rituals and religious practices from the use
of herbs. The entire healing act should be accepted as a whole to avoid the danger of abstracting
the belief and practices from the whole and arriving at conclusions that are quite different from the
meaning they have in context.
The lack of precision is by no means restricted to traditional medicine. Much of modern medi-
cine could be dismissed as pure magic since it has long been known that placebos, the inert sub-
stances that contain no remedy but look and taste like the medicine they are imitating, could cure
up to 40% of patients treated with them. The expected cure could take place largely because of
the personality of the physician, the physician's power of persuasion, and the faith of the patient in
the physician's treatment. The rituals at worse could be accommodated as a highly sophisticated
form of psychotherapy, and the limitations of traditional medicine should also deserve the same
sympathetic excuses offered by practitioners of Western medicine when it fails. There are obvious
problems in the marriage of the two systems; differences in philosophical viewpoints, methods of
diagnoses, and treatment have to be resolved. These differences are real, not merely hallucinations
or products of warped imagination—they can be neither ignored nor wished away with patriotic
rhetoric as if they do not exist. What is needed is an unbiased arbitrator; with the material and intel-
lectual weapons heavily tilted to the side of orthodox medicine, a good arbitrator should at least
be appreciative of the approach of the native healers. Medical scientists should begin to resolve
the contradiction playing on the African from the cultural conflict into which he or she has been
thrown, unprepared and without warning. Scientific objectivity should not be sacrificed simply to
accommodate traditional values and beliefs. The old must, of necessity and nature, give way to the
new, but only if the new beliefs and practices are demonstrably better than what they replace. The
latest or the most modern in science is not necessarily the most original achievement. Even when
the new concepts are adopted as superior to older ideas, it would be fair to give credit to the original
ideas at least. To admire the success of the present as if it had neither past nor discernible future is
only to make a mockery of knowledge and to indulge in self-deceit. The modern doctor exploits the
accumulated strings of knowledge left behind by earlier healers, usually native doctors, to enrich
his or her armamentarium.
