Traditional "Healing"

A few days ago a teacher visited our health center. In his hand was a list of over 100 traditional medicines that he had collected from elders across the region. Some were plant roots or leaves, other were less appetizing body parts of bats and rodents. He asked us to review the list and tell him which were safe to administer to patients.

Our answer: While we can point out some treatments that are clearly harmful, we have no way of telling if most of his treatments were helpful, harmful, or whether they had no effect what-so ever.

Traditional medicines pose an interesting challenge for practitioners of western medicine here in our region. Technically, traditional medicine is illegal so it usually practiced secretly in homes and remote villages. While I am personally fascinated by the potential of traditional remedies, for the most part, what we see and hear about are the traditional practices that do much more harm than good. Here are a few interesting (and often sad) examples.

1. The same teacher who visited our health center claimed that one of his medicines could cure HIV, and that he had many examples of patients who were “cured” by his medicines.
2. One of the most common methods of traditional healing here is burning the flesh of sick people—often their abdomen or head.
3. If young children have diarrhea, their teeth are sometimes removed to treat the symptoms.
4. Menstruating women are banned from their homes and must sleep outside during their menses.
5. To relieve headaches, vertical slits are sometimes cut into a person’s eyelids.
6. If veins are visible in a child’s head, they are physically removed by cutting them out with a knife.
7. The uvula (the small piece of tissue hanging down the back of your throat) is removed in children to prevent it from being infected.
8. The Menit—nomadic people to the south of us—have very serious beliefs about children. Children who have epilepsy or children whose upper teach cut before their lower ones are routinely killed.

A few weeks ago a 7-year-old was brought into our health center after his parents practiced traditional burning in their home. They were attempting to prevent a leg abscess from spreading upward by burning his abdomen. Unfortunately, they burned so deeply that the burn went all the way into his intestines causing an obstruction. After much consultation, the child was sent home because there was nothing that could be done--the parents knowing that it was their attempt to heal their child that actually killed him. Such preventable deaths are a terrible tragedy in a region where childhood death rates are already way too high. Or maybe it is the fear and desperation associated with seeing children die that drives parents to extreme, harmful acts.