It is impossible in this country to get an estimate of the spread of any illness from the current records of cases in hospital without liaising with traditional healing homes where sadly records are hardly kept, for there are neither enough modern medicine to take care of the nation, admitted the then minister of Health, Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti in an interview in the BBC.
He said many communities have only traditional healers to look after them. Traditional medicine thrives where scientific medicine has not established itself.
Perhaps because traditional medicine is still patronized by a large population, there are a great number of people who described themselves as traditional medicine practitioners. Various people who make claims to practicing traditional medicine today include traditional birth attendants, bone setters, pure herbalists, mystical healers and oracle diviners.
There are also those who work with a mixture of herbs and modern drugs and others who are into foreign forms of traditional medicine such as homeopathic, physicians and acupuncturists.
The law recognizing traditional medicine gives a wide birth to those who practice it. The medical and dental practitioners decree No 23 of 1988 states that any person recognized by his or her community as having been trained in the system of therapeutic medicine traditionally is automatically qualified to practice.
One can see straight away that they merit closer study and encouragement to grow. As a matter of fact the colonial masters issued licenses to genuine herbalists to practice. For meaningful understanding of traditional medicine one should exclude all forms of mysticism, sorcery, witchcraft and other such practices. Our concept of traditional medicine, however, is without prejudice to the use of some local forms of psychotherapy in the treatment of mental illness.
Traditional medicine refers to the authentic practice of the use of medicinal plants in healing as well as the use of established techniques of birth attendance and surgery handed over from generation to generation. Modern medicine accept such aspects of traditional medicine as the use of herbs, concoctions, traditional birth attendance, native surgery (particularly circumcision and bone setting) and traditional psychiatric practice. Many educated Nigerians have expressed lack of confidence in the current practitioners of traditional medicine in the country for their failure to develop a written language of practice such as the chemical formulae co, ch. But what we call orthodox medicine today rely on a great extent on the traditional knowledge of medicinal plants of various races and cultures of the globe to satisfy scientific criteria.
Nigeria’s vegetation is replete with plants and herbs that contain medicinal substances. And all over the world there are traditional medicine practitioners who know many of these plants and herbs. These herbalists cure certain diseases by using crude extracts from their plants and herbs. For instance, most Nigerians are familiar with the traditional use of Dogon Yaro for the cure of malaria.
The mode of training, certification, code of conduct and mode of practice of the modern doctor having already been codified, he thinks the task before the government now is to assist various forms of traditional medicine in the country. ###
Sen. Dr. A. A. Cookey
