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Thandeka Moyo, Health Reporter
ABOUT 80 percent of people living with HIV use traditional medicine, statistics show amid reports that no research has been carried out to prove its efficacy in treating the disease in Zimbabwe.
Using antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) is the only proven management for HIV-infection and has led to a reduction in HIV-related opportunistic infections and AIDS-related deaths, says the World Health Organisation.
The same document says 80 percent of people living with HIV use both traditional and biomedicine.
Presenting a report on traditional medicine by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health, secretary for the Ministry of Health and Child Care Dr Gerald Gwinji bemoaned the fact that a lot of traditional practitioners are unregistered.
“About 52 percent of pregnant women admitted to using some traditional potions either to kill pain or to initiate labour or to make labour easier. Some people use traditional medicine for religious purposes, some use it as complementary therapy for what they are suffering from and some resort to it when conventional systems have failed,” Dr Gwinji.
According to WHO, traditional medicine is one of the primary sources of health care in the region and the ratio of traditional healers to population in Africa is 1:500 whereas the ratio of medical doctors to population is 1:40 000.
For millions of people in rural areas, native healers therefore remain their health providers.
“Traditional medical practitioners or herbalists largely remain unregistered and this is a gap that needs to be filled. We have faced constraints around facilitating the development of traditional medicine as a ministry and these are around issues of standardisation, consistency of the product safety and quality of the product,” said Dr Gwinji.
“Little knowledge exists on whether traditional medicine is effective and it still remains a mystery on whether biomedical medicine is better than indigenous traditional medicines with some people thinking our diseases need an indigenous solution,” said Dr Gwinji.
“Little knowledge is available because no research has been carried out on traditional medicine in Zimbabwe which to date does not have a National Traditional Medicine Research Institute that could be of more use to the country at large.”
He said some traditional medical practitioners keep their work as a secret for fear of losing their indigenous knowledge which can be taken up by established research institutes and they are left with nothing.
@thamamoe
Online Reporter