Until 1996 the practice of traditional healers was outlawed in South Africa and not afforded a legal position in the community of health care providers. In 1978 the World Health Organization (WHO) identified traditional healers as those people forming an essential core of primary health care workers for rural people in the Third World Countries. However in 1994 the new South African government ...

BACKGROUND The global burden of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is a major concern to the World Health Organization (WHO). OBJECTIVE To document STIs treated by Bapedi traditional healers and their methods of diagnoses in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. METHODS A semi-structured questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions was used to collect data from 34 traditional healer...

* Department of pharmaceutcal, College of Pharmacy, Hawler Medical University, Erbil, Iraq. Introduction Herbal medicine is a traditional or folk medicine practice based on the use of plants’ seeds, berries, roots, leaves, bark, flowers and plant extracts for medicinal purposes. Plants are important sources of medicine for thousands of years and are the most important source of life saving drug...

A comparative study on regional traditional healing and community wellness provision in collaboration with traditional healers was conducted in three distinct ecological regions in the southern Western Ghats, India. The study led to the collection of data, from fourteen healers, on their healing systems, local afflictions and modes of treatment, community roles of healers, and adaptations of th...

BACKGROUND Traditional healers are acceptable and highly accessible health practitioners throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Patients in South Africa often seek concurrent traditional and allopathic treatment leading to medical pluralism. METHODS & FINDINGS We studied the cause of five traditional illnesses known locally as "Mavabyi ya nhloko" (sickness of the head), by conducting 27 in-depth inte...

Malaria remains one of the chief causes of mortality among young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Verbal autopsies for cases of childhood mortality in Bagamoyo District, Tanzania demonstrated that degedege, a locally defined illness of children characterized by fever and convulsions, is frequently treated by traditional healers. To investigate this further, an ethnographic study was carried out ...

Based on mixed perceptions which were both negative and positive the policy makers have not been vocal about the process to incorporate traditional healers into the National Health Care Delivery System of South Africa. Negative views were related to the denial that traditional healing does provide a cure and the positive views were identified in the passing of policies from 1994. These policies...

Traditional medicine has been practised in Ghana for centuries with the majority of Ghanaians still patronising the services of traditional healers. Throughout Africa a large number of people use pangolins as a source of traditional medicine, however, there is a dearth of information on the use of animals in folk medicine in Ghana, in particular the use of pangolins. The aim of this study was t...

An ethnomedicinal study was conducted to document the indigenous medicinal plant knowledge and use by traditional healers in southwestern Ethiopia from December 2005 to November 2006. Data were collected from 45 randomly selected traditional healers using semi-structured interviews and observations. Sixty-seven ethnomedicinal plant species used by traditional healers to manage 51 different huma...