To boost healthcare delivery in the country, the Managing Director (MD) of Quincy Wellness and Naturopathic Centre, Lagos, Dr. Tobi Ayodele-Keeney, has called for the integration of African traditional medicine into the healthcare system.
Ayodele-Keeney, who addressed a press conference in Lagos, recently, said experience had shown that administering Western drugs alone was ineffective in treating some ailments.
Her words: “According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Africa healthcare should be integrated with traditional medicine. Eighty per cent of Africans engage traditional herbal medicine doctors as their first choice of treatment. African traditional medicine should be integrated into the healthcare system of Africa. Countries that are proactive have gathered themselves together and started doing it. Based on this, our clinic felt the need to fully integrate Western and traditional medicine. We go traditional in a modernised way to treat patients.
From our experience, we discovered that using Western drugs alone is never effective, but combining it with herbs produces better results.”
She added: “The effectiveness of natural medicine cannot be over-emphasised. This is why we got the licences to practice both services. We pay attention to bedside manner, rapid diagnosis, digitalisation, health education and integrative solutions.”
The Masters Degree holder in Nursing from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA, emphasised that Western medicine does not have cure for chronic diseases hence the need for integration.
“In the medical world, there is no treatment for kidney failure; they can only slow down the progression. But in herbal medicine, we can reverse it. This is why Western medicine should be the alternative medicine, while traditional medicine should be the actual treatment especially in Africa.”
