Bitter Pills:Medicines & The Third World Poor | Page 158

to reappraise the potential of traditional medicine. Dr. Hye, whilst Director of
Drug Administration in Bangladesh, explained their thinking: "In recent years,
there has been a world-wide search for new approaches to health and health care
to close the gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' ... and attain a minimum
level of health for all citizens within the limitation of a country's own resources.
In this context, the utilisation of traditional systems of medicine, which have a
long history of practice, utility and know-how ... is obviously a useful approach
in attaining the goal of primary health care for all." (7)
WHO has lent its stamp of respectability to indigenous medicine, urging Third
World governments not to "rely exclusively on western-type medicine or westerntrained physicians in attempting to provide health care for all their people", but
aim for a "synthesis ... between the best of modern with the best of traditional
medicine".'81

GOOD AND BAD PRACTICES
Attitudes to traditional medicine are often polarised between contemptuous
dismissal and idealised overstatement of its advantages. As with allopathic (or
conventional modern) medicine, there are of course both negative and positive
sides to traditional systems. Some local remedies are simple and effective and
enable people to be self-reliant. For example, in Bangladesh people make the most
of wood apples (aegle mermalos) that grow wild throughout the country. When
diarrhoeal disease is at its height in the monsoon season, the raw green fruit can
be boiled with sugar and used to treat diarrhoea. In the dry season, the ripe fruit
has the opposite effect, acting as a laxative.(9>
Dr. Klouda, OXFAM Medical Adviser, reports from Tanzania that the usefulness
of traditional healers is as varied as their healing methods. "The healers' role in
society has been greatly romanticised. There is a broad spectrum of such people
- from idiots, to charlatans, to people just starting, to the very- experienced, to
members of a family who happen to have dealt with some illness before. Some
are generalists and some specialise in herbs, or bone-setting, or psychiatry, or
social medicine, or magic or witchcraft, or poisoning. Some are a very great benefit
- especially because of their personal knowlege of families, the background causes
of poor health and their individual attention to their patients."<10)
Amongst the most helpful local practitioners are the traditional midwives. WHO
estimates that these women help with as many as two-thirds of all births in some
countries. "" They are experienced and they give invaluable psychological
reassurance. But some of their practices are very harmful, particularly the
widespread tradition of applying cow-dung after cutting the umbilical cord. This
is responsible for many cases of neo-natal tetanus.
Other local healers' practices are at best dubious and sometimes positively
dangerous. Dr. Klouda cites the example of a colleague in Tanzania who "was
nearly killed by a drug that partly destroyed his kidneys's tubules". He had been
prescribed this remedy by a traditional healer for "weakness" after a bout of
malaria. "2> From Bangladesh, a kobiraj (one type of local healer) is reported to
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