Chapter 3
Box 3.2 Herbal healers and HIV

Traditional healers in Uganda help HIV patients with ailments hospitals cannot treat. Where biomedicine fails, some herbal remedies score success. So impressed is Uganda’s Ministry of Health, it is now helping the healers process and package their products for wider distribution.

While quacks still sully the name of traditional healing in many parts of Africa, peddling phoney potions to the desperate, clinical evidence shows that plant medicines from skilful practitioners do alleviate HIV-related conditions. Chronic skin and diarrhoeal complaints are among those successfully treated.

Donna Kabatesi is a public health specialist with the Ministry of Health’s STIs unit. She spends her mornings preoccupied with conventional medicine at Kampala’s Old Mulago Hospital but, come afternoon, heads off to direct Traditional and Modern Health Practitioners Together against AIDS (THETA). Besides researching herbal remedies, THETA is nurturing dialogue and cooperation between healers and health workers. Healers are trained to recognize symptoms and determine what they can treat and what should be referred to clinics. Workshops demystify traditional medicine for modern health personnel. These are still early days, concedes Kabatesi, but it is no longer unusual in Uganda for doctors to refer patients to healers if hospital treatments are not working.

In a country where there may be one doctor for 30,000 people, and a chronic shortage of competent health workers, trained healers could bridge many gaps – and not only for HIV/AIDS. Says Kabatesi, “Every village has its healers, and we estimate there is one for every 100 adults across the nation. In a population of 22 million that is an interesting statistic. I just returned from a workshop in a county which has 20 health workers but a minimum of 300 operating healers.”

The potential has not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Over half a million healers reportedly practise in South Africa, where there are more than 650 traditional healer organizations. USAID and others have funded training of trainers there, covering HIV prevention, counselling, management of symptoms, care and support.

THETA evolved from the interest of Mulago doctors who discovered some of their own HIV/AIDS patients consulted healers as well. Curious to know if they had answers to some of the hospital’s enduring problems, the doctors gained healers’ consent to set up a study group. Over a one-year period, 250 patients were observed to see if herbal treatment could remedy what doctors could not. Three useful treatments were discovered, including one for herpes zoster. Says Kabatesi, “We discovered patients came to the healers not only for the effectiveness of their herbs but for the comfort they provided. They had excellent communication and counselling skills which needed only reinforcement with greater knowledge of HIV and AIDS.”

Obstacles remain. Healers are suspicious of the establishment, afraid researchers will misappropriate their secrets, mindful too of how they have been harassed, arrested and imprisoned in the past for their practices. Many doctors and health workers remain sceptical there is a place for traditional medicine. But President Yoweri Museveni has come out strongly in favour of inclusion, as has WHO.

WHO’s regional office for Africa is developing a strategy for traditional medicine that would integrate it into national health-care systems for the general treatment of disease. Regional director Ebrahim Samba has said traditional medicinal products could eventually be exported for the economic benefit of African countries, and he has called for the protection of healers’ intellectual property rights by appropriate patenting.