Traditional Medicine in Asia

Traditional Medicine in Asia
practitioners in district health care, with
traditional health practitioners themselves
as principal investigators, could greatly
enhance development in this field. To take
another example, making available simple
multipurpose kits containing appropriate
therapeutic agents and basic instruments
that could be handled by traditional
practitioners in their own practices, as is
done in some countries, could do much to
improve the quality of their work.
Traditional medicine activities must, of
course, be adequately funded and external
and internal funding agencies and nongovernmental
organizations should be
coopted into this endeavour.
Some guiding principles for
developing a training system
in traditional medicine
The above experiences and questions
provide the overall context for establishing
and improving education and training
programmes in traditional medicine. The
more immediate context for policy and
action will be the structure and the function
of the human resources development subsystem
in the particular country.
WHO advocates that each level of the
health system should be the responsibility
of the most suitably trained health
professionals, and not necessarily the “most
highly” trained staff. The support such
“suitably trained” staff need must be
provided by the higher levels of staff. This
would be a critical requirement to
“integrate” the traditional medicine
practitioners in the general health care
system and place them in a position of
maximum use to the community.
WHO also believes that the three main
components of the human resources
development process – planning, production
and management or utilization –
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should be functionally integrated, and
these, in turn, should be integrated with
overall health systems development. In this
scenario, ideally education and training
in traditional medicine should be
articulated within this system. But reality
is often otherwise. Many of the efforts in
the education and training of traditional
medicine practitioners in the countries are
made on an ad hoc basis outside the
mainstream of human resources for health
development and do not constitute an
integral part of the education and training
of health professionals. The reasons for
this state of affairs are multiple, but they
originate mainly from two generic
problems that are inherent in our health
systems. One is the place of traditional
medicine in the health system, the types
of issues that were identified in the earlier
part of this paper. The other is an
attitudinal and hierarchical problem
wherein the practitioners of the modern
allopathic system of medicine do not
recognize the practitioners of traditional
medicine to be on par with them. The
years of dominance of the allopathic
system, and the technological advancement
it has achieved, supported by
public perception and demand, have
combined to create this situation and it
will be narve to expect it to change
overnight. But this is a fundamental
problem that needs to be recognized and
addressed appropriately in many of our
countries.
None of the three processes in human
resources development – planning,
education and management – can function
independently of each other. They have their
own cycles, though.
� Human resources planners acting
independently of production and
management become paper planners
only;