Healed and crippled: the effect of global medicine on African indigenous treatment and care approaches

Abstract

Whereas global medicine and health care practices have improved the quality of people’s lives, especially in the developing countries data abounds that local communities have been crippled by the same medical practises. Some societies in developing countries have become sources of specimen for clinical trials of biomedicine which is unaffordable to their citizens. This paper explores the neglect of traditional African medicinal innovations and research in favour of imported Western medicine perpetuated by the developed countries. The paper argues that global medicine and health care have neither utilized nor recognized the African Traditional Medicine (ATM) fully, despite the fact that cultures in developed world used and continue to utilize the indigenous medical knowledge. The paper further argues that instead of neglecting African Traditional Medicine, ATM and biomedicine can be more beneficial by blending them into a single system, through what we would call in this paper High-Performance Medical Research (HPMR). This would allow participation of communities to achieve both socio-economic and medical knowledge growth rather than being a monopoly and preserve of developed organizations in the North. This paper proposes that HPMR should be a systematic and scientific approach for enhancing local people’s participation in the development of medical ventures. This paper draws on secondary data on traditional African therapeutic practices by some local communities in East Africa combined with literature review on medical practice in Western societies.