The starting point (II of VII): Ghanaian medicine

     In the end, I was able to overcome all my fears and I truly fell in love with Ghana. Beth and I spent 8 months in Pramkese. Every one assumed we were married, although we weren’t. I worked in a small government health clinic and Beth, a lawyer by training, taught English to elementary students in the village school. I never had to do that emergency c-section, but I was introduced to several new forms of traditional medicine.

     At times, I felt as if I had been placed in a time machine and transported back 100 years to the pre-antibiotic era in the United States. While I diligently attempted to cure the ills of the villagers with my small armamentarium of antibiotics and western therapies, the general populace continued to seek “alternative” remedies. Even my medical staff was not immune to the lure of a street peddler who drove into town with a loud speaker on the top of his pick-up truck selling a “cure-all tonic” that purportedly was effective for piles (hemorrhoids), back pain, fevers, malaise, headaches, and more. To my astonishment, villagers emerged from the woodwork to place old bottles, cans, and plastic jugs in the bed of the peddler’s pickup truck to be filled with a dark brown concoction. I could not help but roll my eyes and give a look of dismay as my chief medical officer, Mary, who had trained in Germany, brought forward her own bottle to be filled. It would have been convenient to attribute this behavior of the villagers to poverty and it’s being too expensive to be seen in the Community Health Clinic, but I knew otherwise. It was well known that it cost only $0.25 to be seen by “the doctor” and that even this nominal fee would be waived if necessary.

While in Ghana, I cared for several other patients who came to me for a second opinion after traditional remedies had failed. One gentleman came to the clinic and complained of chronic pain in his right ear. He had tried several herbal remedies recommended by a local practitioner, but he was not getting better. With my otoscope in hand, I peered into his ear canal. To my surprise, his ear was jammed full of crushed herbs! After briefly irrigating his ear with some warm water, he was miraculously cured. This case and similar ones did little to bolster my faith in traditional healing methods, but I was also aware that I only saw the failures rather than the potential masses of persons who had been successfully cured by Ghanaian traditional healing.

[Stay tuned for tomorrow’s visit with the Juju priestess…]