Globalization set in motion through colonization and ensuing modernization processes, including urbanization, education, religion, and a neo-liberal economic system, have introduced a social order creating physical as well as social distances between users of traditional medicine and the healers. While familiarity and relevance may explain the continued use of traditional medicine, its services may not be as readily available, accessible, or even affordable as is often asserted. This has led to isolating herbal medicine from spiritualism, which may in turn affect the holistic perspective of traditional medicine. Furthermore, integration efforts have tended to embrace selected components mostly herbal medicine. Instead, integration is often defined and dominated by biomedical professionals and health planners who may be unfamiliar or even hostile to some aspects of traditional medicine. More problematic however is that integration is, as in many development interventions, a top-down policy that is rarely based on contextual realities and conditions. In addition, there are significant paradigm differences that may present obstacles to integration of the two systems. The case studies however point to the loss of essential cultural elements central to traditional medicine in this particular area while users travel long distances to reach the healers. Its integration into the health care system would therefore promote cultural familiarity. It is often argued that people continue to use traditional medicine because it is affordable, available, and culturally familiar. While the cases are too few to represent the broad diversity of cultures and related healing systems in the Sub-Sahara African Region, the way they seem to refute the main assumptions in the integration discourse is important, also because studies from other countries in the region report perspectives, similar to the case studies in Kenya. This paper examines the state of traditional medicine using evidence from three case studies in Central Kenya.
Indigenous or traditional medicine has, since the 1970s, been widely regarded as a resource likely to contribute to strengthening the health care systems in low income countries.
His new work, in its “eco-historical” mode, performs Romantic-styled archaeology across spatial and temporal scales, and between disciplines from literary history to the Earth and atmospheric sciences. He is the author of two books on British Romanticism: The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001) and Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1780-1840 (Cambridge 2010). He is currently Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Ballarat, Australia, and received his Ph.D from Columbia University in 2000.