More patients worldwide seek cure from traditional medicine
Traditional and Complementary Medicine (TCM) is now becoming a choice of treatment in many countries worldwide, and patients are favouring the promise of minimized side effects found in synthetic drugs.
Recent report in North Africa and the Middle East said that while TCM is gaining popularity in these regions, advocates are still faced with the dilemma of how to lobby for it in order to be formally accepted as an alternative form of medical treatment.
In Israel, a well-known hospital, the Dr Adi Fromm’s hospital, have found that patients who are averse to western painkillers seek alternative therapy for relief.
Dr Fromm, who is the head of the TCM Association Israel, said: “The first challenge is to make the Western medicine profession understand that TCM is a valid tool in what I call the ‘health basket’ that we can give to people.”
In Israel, TCM was only formally recognised in the early 90s. In North Africa, particularly in areas like Tunisia, TCM is barely known.
Nonetheless, while TCM has its share of popularity, it still is not generally practiced within the mainstream healthcare system.
In East Jerusalem in Israel, Palestinian patients are being introduced to acupuncture by Dr Abbas Elias Yousef Zaro, an alternative medicine practitioner.
“When I finished my studies and came back to Palestine, I opened a clinic in Ramallah. For the first five years, people did not accept it very much, but things have changed since then. Still, the government has no plans to bring alternative medicine to the hospitals, ” he said.
Elsewhere, TCM has already been integrated into the healthcare system, albeit in varied degrees.
Laws pertaining to TCM are already in place in Australia and South Africa.
Meanwhile, ongoing studies related to TCM are being conducted most especially in countries that the discipline has already been accepted.
For the past two years, a team of researchers from the University of Airlangga in Surabaya, Indonesia has been studying several active substances from plants in an attempt to find a herbal cure for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Based on test tube experiments conducted, substances from two plants, Justicia gendarussa and Camelia sinesis , have been found to have the ability to reduce the count of HIV, based.
The next step was to start tests on “living beings, from animals to humans,” Nasronudin, the head of the research team said.
He also said that the final research results will provide clues for a possible cure for HIV/AIDS and that manufacturing would be handled by a pharmaceutical company capable of mass production.
Nasronudin said the product would be an antiretroviral (ARV) medicine, a treatment that assists HIV/AIDS patients to lower the viral load in their blood.
“Hopefully, Indonesia can produce HIV/Aids medicine on its own, so that we do not need to continue to import it,” he said, adding that developing and manufacturing the medicines locally can result in cheaper priced medicine, thus, more people will have access to them..
In a related news, a hospital that will treat HIV/AIDS with herbal medicine will be built in Gambia, West Africa.
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh said in 2007, he had found a remedy of boiled herbs to cure AIDS.
Recently he announced that a 1,111-bed hospital project is underway to treat HIV/AIDS patients with natural medicine.
“With this project coming to fruition, we intend to treat 10,000 HIV/AIDS patients every six months through natural medicine,” he said, adding that the hospital is expected to be opened in 2015.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) have expressed their doubts over the said treatment for HIV/AIDS because that would mean patients are required to discontinue their anti-retroviral drugs, thus making them more prone to infection.
Jammeh earlier said that 68 HIV/AIDS patients undergoing his herbal remedy had been cured and discharged, the seventh batch since the treatments began five years ago.
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