Traditional Healers

If I could tease out a single public health issue, in addition to the crippling stigmatization of HIV, it would be the presence of “traditional healers” in Africa. When a person is made to believe that an illness is a curse rather than a medical problem, it is natural that one seeks out a spiritual healer rather than medical care. Twice in the last 2 weeks, I have admitted previously healthy young boys who had been brought to a traditional healer for a minor ailment and came to us in acute liver failure. They don’t know what they took, but soon after they saw this healers the whites of their eyes became yellow and they started having abdominal pain. The first boy I saw walked into my clinic room, crying and complaining of abdominal pain and was dead within 12 hours. Now I have another little boy on the wards with LFTs in the thousands that I am holding my breath for. That’s the thing about acute liver failure. What can we do? Watch for bleeding and infections, hope that they don’t become too altered to protect their airway, pray. It is the worst, not only because there is nothing that we can do, but because someone DID THIS to them. They are just little boys, their parents are well-intentioned, but their little bodies can’t handle whatever toxins they are being fed.

In my idealistic mind, I would like to think that the traditional healers are also well-intentioned and are doing what they believe is helpful. So I asked one of the long-term missionary doctors who’s been at a nearby hospital since 1992—do you think they’re evil? Do you think they are intentionally hurting people? She is a sweet little lady with a huge brain and heart to boost, and she answered me as follows, “I hate to paint all traditional healers with the same brush, but I do believe that they represent all that is evil in the world. They are the evil that lives among us, they prey on the vulnerable for a profit and they manipulate Africans in their most desperate hour.” She proceeded to tell me multiple unbearably horrible stories about local traditional healers and the deaths that pursued. The things the traditional healers have said, the ways which they convinced villagers not to come to the hospital, the way they provide false hope, and in many instances, the way they have brought death to the already vulnerable. And it is a vicious cycle. The patients come to us when all they have left to do is die in our hospital beds, so it is no wonder they associate hospitals with death. And to boot, they will have a large monetary bill from the things we try to do to save them, when previously they paid the healers with chickens and goats. “There is some darkness in that beautiful world out there,” she told me. “They are still making living sacrifices in the bushes, feeding poison to our children, tempting Adam with the forbidden fruit”.

Three days ago, 32 witch doctors were arrested in Tanzania where it is a common belief among traditional healers that the limbs of albino children hold magical powers. These traditional healers were kidnapping albino children, killing them, and using the bones of their arms and legs to make potions. In some cases they cut off a hand or a foot and left the child bleeding. One of the doctors here who had worked their previously said the albino patients would refuse to leave the hospital, as they lived in constant fear of being kidnapped or mutilated by witch doctors. Here in Mbingo, there are lots of albino children, they march around in their wide-brimmed hats without a care in the world. The lady that cleans our house has 5 children, one set of twins, and a boy and a girl who are albino. It is hard to believe that had they been born just a couple countries to the east they would have been forced into a life of constant fear. I’d like to think that there are not as equally horrible practices here in Cameroon, but I’d be naïve to think so.

Though maybe there are a few good-intentioned traditional healers out there, the damage that is being done by the ones whose patients I see is nothing but evil. But it is an engrained culture, a constant fight over strongly held spiritual beliefs. Even medical doctors were somewhat of witch doctors at one point, but I would hope that at least our intentions were good and our work was not at the expense of another human being. These are the types of things you read along the lines of holocaust, female circumcision, voodoo sacrifice, infanticide, things that you feel are almost too painful to think about. Things of another world, things of another time. But it is our world and it is our time, and there are many things that we need to believe that are otherwise too hard to believe.