Copyright © 1998 Panafrican News Agency. All Rights Reserved

January 5, 1998

Peter Masebu, PANA Correspondent

DAKAR, Senegal (PANA) - As modern medical cure gets dearer for the
majority in Africa, the only salvation lies in traditional medicine, Dr.
Charles Finch, an African-American, said here Monday.

In an interview in Dakar, Finch, who is Director of International Health
Programmes at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, said
African traditional medicine is not only cost effective but also
therapautically effective than modern medicine.

Finch was participating in the open day of Senegalese traditional
healers, grouped under the Assocition for the Promotion of Traditional
Medicine (PROMETRA) in Dakar.

The validity of traditional medicine in a particular country is that it
has both long term health and economic benefits, said Finch, who is
president of PROMETRA.

He urged Africans to learn from people in the developed world, who were
opting for alternative medicine including traditional herbs, to cure
ailments which modern therapy has not been able to.

He said he was confident the cure for the AIDS could come from plants.

The opening of the open day was chaired by the Senegalese minister of
scientific research and technlogy, Marie-Louise Correa.

She said that classical drugs were not only expensive but people have to
walk long distance to reach hospitals. These drugs are also incapable of
curing certain ailments of the mind.

Accordinmg to her, these factors had prompted the Senegalese government
to put emphasis on the revalorisation of traditional medicine as one of
the means of moving toward health for all by the year 2000.

The minister stressed the need for more scientific research to make
traditional medicine more acceptable to all. Hitherto, she added, this
type of medicine has faced all sorts of discrimination with negative
economic and cultural impacts.

Highlights of the open day included a film on faith healing which was
shot in the United States with actors from Senegal and the United
States.

There was also a short play depicting the success of a traditional
healer who helped a woman conceive after she had failed to do so using
modern medicine.

The play culminates into the recognition of the traditional healer by
the doctor who had originally treated the woman.

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