Traditional healers are a source of health care for which Africans have always paid and even with the expansion of modern medicine healers are still popular. This paper advances the unique view that traditional healers neither possess supernatural power nor do they take advantage of their clients: they use important elements of their practice to credibly deliver unobservable medical effort and ...

The issue of whether and how ethnomedical practitioners can be incorporated into existing biomedical systems in developing countries continues to be debated. Although a number of reasons have been advanced as to the barriers to incorporation, none of these take into account the views of nurses on incorporating ethnomedical practitioners into the biomedical system. Data from Botswana, where the ...

To describe the role of traditional healers in STD case management, in-depth interviews were held with 16 healers (seven witchdoctors, five herbalists and four spiritual healers) in four slum areas in Nairobi, Kenya. All healers believed that STDs are sexually transmitted and recognized the main symptoms. The STD-caseload varied largely, with a median of one patient per week. Witchdoctors and h...

OBJECTIVE The study aimed to investigate the types of mental illnesses treated by traditional healers, and their methods of identifying and treating mental illnesses in their patients. METHOD In urban informal settlements of Kibera, Kangemi and Kawangware in Nairobi, Kenya, we used opportunistic sampling until the required number of traditional healers was reached, trying as much as possible ...

BACKGROUND Child vaccination is one of the public health interventions that are responsible for the relatively low child morbidity and mortality in developed nations compared to the developing world. We carried out this study to examine the association between mothers' use of traditional healer services and vaccination among Haitian children. Our hypothesis was that children whose mothers used ...

BACKGROUND Bapedi traditional healers play a vital role in the primary health care of rural inhabitants in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. However, literature profiling their social and demographic variables, as well as their traditional healing practices is lacking. METHODS Convenience sampling were used to identify and select two traditional healers from 17 municipalities (resulting in ...

Many ethnic groups are known to use traditional healers often in conjunction with Western biomedical medicine, thus combining treatment regimens and medical advice as they see fit. Awareness of the use of traditional healers is an increasingly salient issue due to the growing diversity and aging of the U.S. population. To explore the determinants of use of traditional healers, we studied demogr...

The paper describes applied research efforts, requested by the Swaziland Ministry of Health and funded by U.S. AID, aimed at providing an information base for new government policies regarding traditional healers in Swaziland. Information reported relates to: health care manpower in the traditional sector; treatment seeking behavior in a pluralistic medical setting; traditional health beliefs a...