October 24, 2009 · 1 Comment
The Lancet recently reported that South Africa has established the Traditional Health Practitioners Act which provides registration and training of traditional practitioners and serves to protect the interest of those who use the services. While traditional medicine is still unregulated, this is a step in the right direction toward building a bridge between allopathic medicine and traditional healing.
According to this article, in South Africa, patients often seek care from both systems assigning the task of diagnosing and treating the pathology to the doctor while relying on the traditional healers to establish what is wrong with the mind-body connection.
In fact, collaboration between the two systems could potentially lead to better outcomes than either one alone. One example is the use of traditional practitioners as supervisors for TB treatment programs. In one study, conducted in South Africa, over 3000 patients were registered and assigned to either DOT (Directly Observed Treatment) program supervisors or traditional practitioners and there was no difference in results – indicating a potential role for traditional healers in ambulatory DOT programs.
Especially in developing countries, where access to physicians and providers of allopathic medicine may be geographically or financially beyond reach, traditional healers are more frequently sought and more often trusted. It is exactly for this reason that steps to standardize the training, licensing and therapies of this parallel system would go a long way towards improving the quality of care and health outcomes in developing countries.
Categories: Africa · Traditional Healers · Uncategorized
Back after a bout of an upper respiratory infection, I was surprised by the statistics of preterm births.
More than one million infants die each year because they are born too early, according to the just released White Paper, The Global and Regional Toll of Preterm Birth. As mentioned online, Africa tops preterm birth rates around the world at 11.9 percent, followed by North America (10.6 percent) and Asia (9.1 percent), according to statistics recently published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Not surprisingly Africa is in the lead but surprisingly the USA is second in line.
If the MDGs are to be realized, this is one area that will need to be addressed. In order to reduce by 2/3 childhood mortality, we will need to understand why the number of preterm births has increased and how we can improve neonatal care to improve survival of these fragile lives.
Interestingly, in North America, a rise in the number of pregnancies in women over age 35, and reproductive technologies, have contributed to the increase in premature births, according to the WHO.
While little is known about the exact causes of pretermature births in the developing world, this article states “…malnutrition, coexisting with malaria, anemia, bacterial diseases and inadequate prenatal care are likely factors in the high preterm rates in Africa,” he said.
Preterm births are responsible for 27 percent of newborn deaths.
This brings me back to a prior blog post that seems even more relevant than ever, “Saving newborn lives can be simple.“
Categories: Uncategorized
