The Traditional Health Practitioners Act (THPA) promotes non-scientific religious practice in the form of public healthcare, says the NGO Doctors for Life International (DFL).
Spokesperson Bola Omoniyi told the Mail & Guardian Online this week that the NGO is vehemently opposed to the Act.
The Act has been a cause of great debate since its inception a few years ago. Passed in 2005, it proposed, among other things, setting up an interim council to register and regulate African traditional healers within the country.
Since 1994 the government had been working with healers towards formal recognition and collaboration, said Rose Mdlalose, director of human resources in the Department of Health. The government is still grappling with the issue today.
This year, DFL took the matter to the Constitutional Court on the grounds that the Act was “unconstitutional” and that it lacked public participation. In August, the court ruled in DFL’s favour, temporarily suspending the Act. Parliament now has 18 months to canvass public opinion before it can be implemented.
Omoniyi said DFL is opposed to the formalisation of traditional healing because of its use of unidentified, untested substances that should not be approved for human use.
“Traditional healers use untested ‘medicines’ from mysterious origins and consisting of unidentified ingredients, the identity of which they often insist must remain secret,” she said, referring to traditional muti that healers blend, with the help of their ancestors, to treat certain ailments.
“Ancestral spirits cannot be monitored, controlled or regulated and neither can they be held accountable for malpractices,” Omoniyi told the M&G Online. “In effect, the government would be legalising an unregulated and non-standardised practice [with the THPA].”
Mdlalose said traditional medicine has been used in South Africa “for time immemorial” and that 60% to 80% of the population still use it today.
She said traditional medicine plays a major role in the care of sick individuals in a way that matches their own culture and understanding, and it should be formalised.
She added that the implementation of the THPA would “facilitate protection of the public from unscrupulous practitioners and quacks”.
Professor Robert Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand who has worked closely with traditional healers for the past five years, disagrees. “The THPA is based on misunderstandings and ignorance on the part of legislators,” he said this week.
Thornton explained that traditional healers should not be thought of as “sort of indigenous medical doctor[s]” as the Act makes them out to be.
Although healers may work with herbs and treat common ailments, that is just a part of what they do, Thornton feels. “[Healers] act like personal advisers in issues of family conflict, sexuality and sex, love and loss of love. They … construct useful interpretations of people’s lives.”
Thornton said it is extremely unlikely that a significant number of healers would want to be registered under the Act. He said no two healers are the same, and can therefore not be grouped together.
“It is likely that only the impostors and charlatans will seek registration. The real healers with good local reputations do not need it, and do not want it,” Thornton said. “Those with little knowledge, however, can benefit from the legitimacy the Act would give them, and allow them to charge higher fees.”
Healers interviewed by the M&G Online were unaware of the Act’s existence.
Thornton said the healers he had spoken to were interested in the Act because formalisation would enable them to charge higher fees, but he said this would be another negative effect as it would be detrimental to poorer communities who depend on these health practitioners.
The Health Department’s Mdlalose said the traditional healers need formal recognition. “Perhaps cures for some of the diseases prevalent in the region may eventually be discovered through collaboration with other health practitioners and the world of science.”
However, Omoniyi feels that this cannot work, as “double standards [are] applied to the standards and codes of conduct for African traditional healers and practitioners of modern medicine”.
“Traditional healers should be held to the same laws and standards that govern all aspects of society in relation to the treatment of human life,” she said, referring to the fact that traditional muti, unlike Western medicine, does not have to be scientifically tested.
Thornton said a most disturbing aspect of the Act is that it “says that it is an offence to offer to heal Aids if the healer is not registered. This implies that anyone who is registered can do so,” adding that such ideas are “wrong and dangerous”.
“This [the THPA] will, in general, harm the practice of traditional healing over all,” Thornton told the M&G Online.
“In fact, the Act is not likely to ever be implemented fully. The nature of its understanding is so radically misguided that it cannot be implemented,” he said.