Charly Ndi Chia
25 April 2008
interview
Professor Daniel Noni Lantum is, to say the least, in a class of his own. A Western-trained medical practitioner and Professor in Public Health, he is also a prolific writer with several tiles on Nso folklore to his credit. But wait for this: The Professor is into traditional medical practice and easily combines this with conventional medicine.Professor Lantum was in Buea last week and talked exclusively to The Post. It is a must read.
The Post: My main curiosity is the two personalities that you incorporate; namely the conventional medical doctor and the traditional practitioner. How do these two marry? And how did you acquire both?
Prof. Lantum: I am a civilised African. I mean that I also learned and acquired what we call the folk wisdom of Cameroon, and part of folk wisdom is traditional medicine. I learned about medicinal plants. I was treating people, before I went to secondary school and after that, I decided to do medicine.
One of the reasons was that I had onchocerchiasis and there was no traditional medicine that could treat it; so I had to go and learn modern medicine to treat myself and other people. When I became a medical doctor and eventually a professor, I said wouldn't abandon folk medicine and that is why I combine the two.
Being a modern doctor and scientist didn't help me to be able to do a lot of research on folk remedy, and to prove that they were effective. It also meant that I had to drop the bias that was imposed by colonialism. Anything about Africa was not good. I didn't believe in that, so I said, I will go and see, and I gave a scientific dimension to what was called empirical knowledge.
Which of them takes the biscuit, traditional or conventional? In other words, in which of these fields are you more competent, more functional?
Prof. Lantum: Doctor of medicine, and as a professor, teaching the thing to modern physicians, that becomes far more open. I earn my living from that one, but all the same, I am fully aware that traditional medicine is important. I have worked with the Ministry of Health and particularly with the World Health Organisation, WHO, and the Ministry of Health is going to adopt traditional medicine and seek ways of integrating it into other health care services. Whether the ministry does that officially or not, in practice it happens. There is no question about that.
When do you find it convenient to practise traditional instead of conventional medicine?
Prof. Lantum:If somebody from the village comes up to me and talks of a problem which involves rural concepts and so on, I understand him in the traditional context and I develop the issue with him, from that point of view. Then see what we could do within the local context. I write a prescription for him. I am also able to explain to him that this is a natural disease, and that it can be treated with modern medicine without any kind of confusion about customs.
Have you ever had occasion to consult and start treating a patient in a modern hospital only to decide along the line to switch to the traditional way?
Prof. Lantum:Oh yes! For instance, I discovered the treatment for cataract when I was Chief Medical Officer of Tiko Hospital. I had no ophthalmologist; so when patients came, I treated them with traditional medicine and opened their eyes. I treated my father with that traditional medicine which I learned from a Bororo man who was treating the cataract in the bushes of Ndumbo. It worked. Also, there are times when people come to you and their folk remedy is handy and then you prescribe that to them.
Do you by any means belong to the league of traditional doctors who advertise the "200 disease cure"? How comfortable are you with this claim?
Prof.Lantum:When you start talking of one drug, which treats 200 diseases, you are talking bull-shit; you are talking nonsense absolutely. What is a disease? When a man says that he has had a heart disease, what he means is gastritis. When you ask him 'what is a disease to you?' He tells you symptoms and cough, diseases and things like that. All that is bull-shit. They simply want to bamboozle people and look great. That doesn't mean that he actually knows diseases and their specific causes and how to treat them.
You did formal education, getting taught what it takes to arrive at scientific proof. Your not-very-learned "colleagues" without the benefit of formal scientific education may not be in position to give apt scientific diagnosis and prescriptions to particular situations. How safe or unsafe is this?
Prof. Lantum:I wouldn't say it is dangerous because there is what we call empirical knowledge which is perfectly sound.
But empirical knowledge may also amount to several trial and error sessions. Sounds like indiscriminately transforming one's patients into some kind of gullible guinea pigs, don't you think?
Prof.Lantum:No, no, no! You can have revealed knowledge. One man has just died in Kom at 104 years. He was called Ka-leitii. (Don't hide it). How did he get that name Ka-leitii? He was inspired and he was traditionally given to the treatment of mental diseases. He went to Mesaje and found another traditional doctor who was inspired.
The two of them formed an association and took an oath not to hide anything from each other. The name Ka-leitii was not his real name and he had been extremely good in treating with traditional medicine at the hill tops of Anyajua. He trained many of the finest traditional doctors responsible for the treatment of mental disease in Cameroon, like Fokunang who died, and a series of others in Kom, Belo and so on.
There is no question about that. He had a large garden of traditional medicine; he had, through time been able to come out with a formula of recipes for composing traditional doctor's work. When you brought a man in ropes, Ka-la-eitii gave him a powder to smell; he released him and the man began to sleep.
It doesn't change the fact that some of them are hungry, eking out a living from leafy concoctions that may not quite harm or cure for that matter?
Prof. Lantum:Yes, there is no question about quacks but they are few. There was a Reverend Sister who came from India; a herbalist and I helped to install her in Fuanantui in Kom. She has now planted a large medicinal garden where she is training local people on how to grow plants and produce traditional medicine drugs under supervision both from the hospital and mysef.
There is Dr. Yong who is has a clinic for the treatment of mental cases and I supervise that clinic. There is Dr. Fumbo who specialises in diabetes. He, himself was sick and he treats himself. There is Mathias Tumenta in Babungo Ndop, who has a mental hospital with about 100 patients. They come from Douala, Yaoundé.
The government refers cases. When children in America, London and elsewhere break down with mental illnesses, I write reference letters to him and they soon get well and go back. Recently we have added a modern health care asset to that institution and it is flourishing.
But when they mass produce, commercialise and advertise aggressively, it amounts to Shylock trading with medicines, don't you think?
Prof. Lantum: I am not for that. I am for the fact that a man who knows his art should have his medicinal plants, produce his drugs, look after patients, diagnose and treat them. If he is able to make drugs, just as we do, and can ventilate and sell them in a chain of stalls, fine. But he cannot say that he is everywhere making diagnosis and treating patients. Be very careful. We can also benefit from modern technologies.
Many of the drugs we have are made in London. We do not know who made them. As long as they have been proven to be "efficative", you can make them and send them abroad, under your name.
Some of them also claim to have an answer or cure for HIV/AIDS. Are they credible?
Prof. Lantum:For the last five years I have been involved in implicating traditional doctors in the control of AIDS in this country. I conducted a series of seminars for the Southern Provinces and in Yaounde, Littoral, and the Western Provinces, South and Northwest Provinces.
The first thing was to give traditional doctors an idea of what AIDS is and to find out what they thought about AIDS. I took them to see AIDS patients and made them to undergo screening. We now discussed and what they do was that when they see a case that they consider by signs and symptoms, they refer to modern hospitals.
But some of them say in clear cut terms that they cure AIDS?
Prof. Lantum:When they say they cure AIDS, there is no question about that. What is AIDS? When a patient has anaemia, fever, malaria, sometimes they can be able treat that. There is no question about it. Many of them have what we call zona, that is, dermatitis that comes out on the chest and other parts.
Traditional healers treat that better than the hospitals. They apply some mud, and after five days, the thing dries off and they are far more efficient. When they treat just that sign, they say they are treating AIDS. They don't know that it is just one sign of a bigger disease.
What is your position on the HIV/AIDS therapy of Professor Victor Anomah Ngu that is being rather resisted, ignored and in some cases even ridiculed by even some of his peers, subordinates and by the regime?
Prof. Lantum:Professor Anomah Ngu is an eminent scientist whom I knew from the sixties. I assisted him on some works on elephantiasis, which helped him to obtain his doctorate degree from the University of London and I worked with him on several issues. A beautiful scientist, good specialist in pathology.
I also worked with him as his student, in the treatment of various diseases in Ibadan where he got his prize. This man came out with a hypothesis and has been testing it. He has not yet proven the hypothesis. Statistically, as a modern scientist, Victor Ngu is supposed to produce statistics about what he is doing.
Unfortunately, AIDS cases are very effervescent. When you treat today, tomorrow they also consult other doctors and receive treatment. Some of them die; he never sees them and so on. So, he is not able to treat thousands of people under controlled conditions to count and give statistics about the effectiveness of whatever he is doing.
So I will say that Professor Ngu is still in the process of testing his hypothesis; he has not yet arrived. When he arrives, he is going to prove that statistically, by treating a thousand cases whereby five or six hundred got well and so many died; there must be a statistical test. That is what he and I learned in science. He hasn't arrived at that.
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