The Role Of Traditional African Medicine

The African continent has long depended on the leaves of the neem tree for treating malaria

Traditional medicine exists as a field of traditional knowledge in close connection with the national culture. Each nation has its own arsenal of popular methods of treatment, which is associated with their traditions and their faith.

In Africa, millions of people rely every day on the care of natural healers, custodians of a millenary tradition that uses herbs. In South Africa, there are more than 20,000 native species to treat various types of diseases, from the common cold to AIDS, this risks encroaching on witchcraft, the developed world know very little about.

The aspects of traditional medicine can be considered as a science based on an understanding of the functioning of the human body that is different from modern medicine and as traditional knowledge of national culture. Comparison of many well-known national methods of treatment allows considering traditional medical science that has its own subject of research, methods, and methods.

Like any other science, traditional medicine can be considered as a science that stands outside the national affiliation, which, being projected into national cultures, takes on a wide variety of types and forms.

In Africa, the World Health Organization estimates that about 85% of the population uses traditional medicine, which is more widespread and accessible, economically, geographically and culturally, than conventional medicine.

In the West, 50% of the population resorted to complementary medicine at least once for an annual turnover of US $ 230 million in the UK alone. The turnover of the world market of medicinal plants amounts to the US $ 60 billion and is rapidly expanding.

Twenty-five percent of traditional medicines are derived from active ingredients of plants used for centuries in traditional medical practices. Many diseases that destroy the people of the developing countries find their first remedies in traditional medicine.

The Artemisia afra is widely used in traditional African medicine to treat respiratory diseases and in the treatment of tuberculosis. Before the white man’s medicine finds its way to developing Africa, the entire population on the African continent depends on traditional medicine.

Africans were able to survive many diseases such as malaria, which the white population couldn’t survive it. Yet, African medicine has been deemed poor and not healthy by the developed world in order to make money with most of their invincible contaminated dangerous drugs brought to Africa.

Continuous denouncing African products as inferior and dangerous have affected many Africans today, bearing the psychological scars that everything from Africa is of poor quality or standard. Africa as a continent never benefits from its riches than the developed world because we believe in the white man than ourselves.

Africa could have been one of the healthiest continents in the world without depending on too much white man’s medicine because many man-made diseases exploded on the continent mostly occurred through medication from the developed world.

In the book, ‘Aids, Origin, Spread, And Healing,’ by the German medical doctor, Wolff Geisler, who is now one of the columnists on ModernGhana news site, he writes:

Mass tuberculosis infections of people with Aids in Africa are not caused by the HIV-infection. The increase in the number of tuberculosis patients in some parts of the world is a result of the intended spread of special tuberculosis agents in camps, hospitals, and prisons by inserting into heroin, medications, and food.

The agents used are hardly contagious, and yet they are resistant to current tuberculosis-medications. They are used, particularly against black people. In special tuberculosis clinics in Uganda, Zambia, Burundi, and Zaire, the patients get intentionally infected with HIV.

Everyone understands the reason most African leaders and health ministers discourage the use of traditional medicines in Africa, since they are not sure how safe those home-made medicines are, yet they must also find a way to research and investigate the quality of drugs from the developed world which come to Africa.