About 2 months before my lecture trip to Congo Brazzaville on the return from which I was robbed by burglars, I had been invited by the UNESCO to the 17th (ordinary) session of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC) in Paris, scheduled on 26 and 27 October 2010, to make a presentation within the framework of the working session on traditional medicine and its ethical implications. The IBC is preparing a report on traditional medicine. In my presentation on the ethics of traditional medicine, I drew attention to the following issues, among many others:
1. Every culture/society has its traditional medicine (TM) which is necessarily indigenous and tends to be holistic, covering all that is necessary for maintaining health, preventing disease and treating ailments (physical, psychic and mental)
2. The traditional medicine of so-called Western societies had rapidly evolved on the wings of science and technology to become ‘Western scientific medicine’ (WSM), which is essentially dualistic, having introduced a sharp distinction between body and mind/spirit and opted to concentrate on the body
3. Western SM has contracted an indissoluble marriage with commerce and the market and is overrunning the globe
4. According to all available researches, African TM is still the first port of call for over 80% of African populations and Western TM should not be described as ‘conventional’, ‘orthodox’ or ‘mainstream’ in such a context
5. The fundamental ethical principles that guide, have guided, and should guide African TM are no different from those that play the same role in Western SM; these namely are respect for others as equals or autonomy, doing good or beneficence, avoiding evil/harm or non-maleficence, and justice or fairness and equity Download ETHICAL ASPECTS OF TRADITIONAL MEDICINE, Tangwa, UNESCO, 2010
6. In our day, African TM has been invaded by quacks, charlatans and con-(wo)men, owing to breakdown of traditional systems, rapid urbanization, poverty and influence of the Western paradigm
7. In Africa, Western SM exists side by side with African TM, and most practitioners of Western SM have a superiority complex, deprecating and depreciating attitude towards African TM
8. Genuine African TM practitioners/healers should be called by their proper name and not dubbed ‘witchdoctors’, ‘sorcerers’ or ‘necromancers’
9. A significant comparative ethical advantage of African TM over Western SM is its easy accessibility and affordability for the populations it serves
10. United Nations agencies, particularly WHO and UNESCO urgently need to reform their attitude, conceptual framework and vocabulary towards African TM; these international agencies are for the most part dominated by Europeans and Americans who, with varying degrees of subtlety, often push Western culture, ideas, values and practices under the guise of universal imperatives of morality, human rights or rationality
My complete presentation is hereby attached.
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