Joseph Karimi
29 January 2002
interview
Kenya's Ministry of Health recently announced that a Bill would soon be tabled in parliament to permit the use of herbal medicines alongside conventional medicine in public hospitals. The proposal has been rejected by the Kenya Medical Association, among others, but strongly supported by herbalists, among them 'Dr' JACK KAGUO GITHAE of the School of Alternative Medicine and Technology in Nyeri.
Githae, who also holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Las Cuzes, New Mexico, USA, worked for the Ministry of Lands and Settlement and various agencies up to 1987, when he retired. He has been involved in herbal practice since the early1970s.
What is your reaction to the Bill to legalise the dispensing of herbal medicine in public health institutions in the country?
It is timely. The fact that the Minister of Health, Prof Sam Ongeri, personally launched the Bill means that it will be implemented.
Kenya is more advanced in herbal practice than the other East African countries. It has Kemri, the School of Alternative Medicine and Technology and many herbal practitioners who are better educated than their counterparts in Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia or Somalia.
Our people need cheap, effective drugs that are readily available and can be incorporated in our agricultural production systems.
The minister said that herbs, most of them from the African continent, are used as ingredients in a significant portion of modern medicines.
That is true. Many Western manunfactured drugs have their origin in herbal medicine. Many communities have used different plants effectively to tackle ailments like asthma, sickle cell anaemia, diabetes, epilepsy, etc.
How can we harmonise traditional and modern medicine?
A drug is anything that alleviates pain, anything that cures an ailment. A medical practitioner is anybody who can diagnose a disease and prescribe a treatment that cures that disease.
A drug must be safe, effective, affordable and readily available. Of course, the more environmentally friendly a drug, the bettter. Herbal drugs are preferrable to manufactured drugs from the West on all these counts. They tackle many of the disease-causing agents and, besides killing these agents, they also complement the nutritive status of our bodies by providing vitamins, minerals, hormones and immuno-modulators that the body requires most when it is sick. While Western drugs are symptom-oriented, traditional medicine and particularly herbal medicine has a holistic approach.
A spokesman of the 5,000-member Kenya Medical Association has said the organisation is opposed to the proposed Bill because it will be detrimental to health care provision in the country.
I can understand and appreciate their concern. When they hear that herbal medicine will be incorporated in our hospitals, they think of the crude materials they are used to seeing with herbalists. The barks, root cuttings and lack of standardisation worry a lot of professionals.
It seems that they are not aware that we now have the capacity to produce herbal medicines in standardised formulations. We have imported a machine, which is now at the port of Mombasa, to manufacture all the herbal medicine required for the Comesa region. We expect to start production within the next two months.
Could you describe this machine?
Called the mobile herbal manufacturing unit, the machine has been donated by the Essential Nutrition Company of London, through the Commonwealth secretariat. It will be based in Kenya and will be used for training people in the Comesa region in modern herbal manufacturing processes. It will also be used in the large-scale production of herbal medicine in various forms - tablets, capsules, syrups, etc.
The essence of the Comesa training workshop to be be held in March this year, and also the objective of an International Trade Fair on herbal medicine and medicinal food later this year, is to expose our medical professionals to the reality of medical practice in the world today. The modern approach incorporates the manufacture, verification and integration of herbal medicine in the medical delivery set-up.
When you talk about prevention and cure of diseases, are you including Aids?
We are including all the diseases in our society: HIV/Aids, the recent anthrax scare, Ebola...
The most basic approach to any disease is to first understand it, its causative agents, mode of entry, development in the body and symptoms.
Do you see doctors agreeing to prescribe herbal medicines any time soon?
Ultimately, all medical practitioners will be one and the same. I am looking forward to a situation where our doctors take over the herbal resource in the same way they have used Western drugs and our hospitals embrace whatever medicines are readily available for our people. The neocolonial categorisation of one form of practice as incompatible with the other must go.
Prof Sam Ongeri, himself a medical professional of repute, has signalled a trend that is irreversible.
Will herbal medicines be cheaper?
When the drugs are locally manufactured from our own resources, the drugs will definitely be cheaper. For example, our clinics, at Ksh 250 for both consultation and a weekly prescription, are probably cheaper than any conventional medical practitioner.
Who initiated the importation of the herbal processing machine?
I campaigned for it. The Ministry of Science and Technology is pursuing its utilisation and the recruitment of the Comesa cadres who will be trained to use it.
It is the only machine of its kind in the world. It is a new innovation that I think will change the status of herbal medicine in the Comesa region.
How will you go about patenting the various drugs you are about to manufacture?
Patenting is a complicated and expensive process. We shall patent where we can.
Where we are not able to patent due to economic constraints or other sociopolitical considerations, we shall develop the drugs in a format that will enable them to be profitably utilised
In other words, our initiative is people driven. It is oriented to the needs of our people in the Comesa region and addresses the capability of our people to access, buy, utilise and benefit from our resources.
Will the project have a research component?
People in Africa have been researching herbal medicine from time immemorial. Our people's traditional scientific framework has enabled them to co-exist with nature better than any other society in the world. Africa is the cradle of humanity; we are the oldest civilisation on earth. We are older than any other society because we are wiser and more intelligent in utilising our resources sustainably - be it plants, animals or human resources.
When we talk about research, many people see institutions such as universities, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute or the Kenya Medical Research Institute as the only places where research is done or should be done. That is a neocolonial concept.
Research is a process whereby people come up with new knowledge and theories about the resources within their own environment. Our people have developed medicines through trial and error.
Herbal practitioners in Africa and more specifically here in Kenya have been researchers all along. At Samtech, we have through our own research developed 36 herbal medicine formulae that we have been prescribing for the past 20 years.
Kemri is involved in scientific research to verify the potential of herbal and conventional drugs. But herbal practitioners engage in applied research, whereby they determine what plants cure which ailments.
They have come up with medicines that tackle, for example, sickle-cell anaemia better than any drug in the Western world.
By the same token, we have developed asthma cures that are probably unique in the world. There is no cure in Western medicine for asthma.
When you talk about a cure for asthma, are you referring to a treatment pioneered by Samtech?
I would rather talk about Samtech, because we handle more asthma conditions than any other. I don't know of anybody who can challenge us in curing asthma.
Are you satisfied with your achievement?
I am very satisfied with our accomplishments so far. Ten years ago, I hesitated to talk of myself as a herbalist, but today everybody is proud of my contribution in this area. My patients are scattered all over the country and the region.
I am particularly proud of the South African Renaissance initiative, where we are talking of the rebirth of the African person. Sooner or later, we shall recapture our integrity, because over the years - through slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism - we have been considered lesser human beings by the West.
Any word for our herbalists on how they can win the public's confidence?
In medical practice, there is only one way of establishing yourself - making sure the medicine you administer is effective and safe.
As long as you continue curing people, and especially desperate people, as long as your reputation is better than any other clinician's, people will flock to you. People do not care whether you are Western-trained or locally-trained. They don't care whether you use capsules from Britain, China or Japan; all they want is a medicine that cures their ailment, is accessible, affordable and sustains their lives while minimising their suffering.
Clinicians who do not deliver, regardless of their credentials and background, eventually have to pack up and go. You cannot cheat in medicine, because so long as you cannot cure a headache, for example, you are not a healer.
So, we are calling on our people to be realistic, practical and honest. We are also appealing to herbalists as well as doctors to be ethical and people-oriented rather than money-oriented.
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