Beyond shamanism: the relevance of African traditional medicine in global health policy.
This article explores the tension between African traditional medicine and orthodox medicine, and argues for a cosmopolitan and inclusive health policy that integrates ethnomedical therapies into the core framework of global health architecture. The paper argues that age-old traditional therapies in Africa are relegated to the peripheries of orthodox health policy. The paper briefly discusses the accelerating pace of globalization of intellectual property rights (patents) as a factor that would continue to perpetrate bio-piracy and threaten traditional herbal therapies with extinction. The search for an inclusive global health policy opens a new vista in the interaction of traditional and orthodox medicine. The paper concludes that a sustained relegation of African traditional medicine to the margins of orthodox health policy is a phenomenon that would likely project the globalization of public health as predatory, discriminatory and unfair.
Aginam
Obijiofor
O
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D016488:Medicine, African Traditional; D019423:Shamanism; D014944:World Health Organization