Conceptual graph-based knowledge representation for supporting reasoning in African traditional medicine

Although African patients use both conventional or modern and traditional healthcare simultaneously, it has been proven that 80% of people rely on African traditional medicine (ATM). ATM includes medical activities stemming from practices, customs and traditions which were integral to the distinctive African cultures. It is based mainly on the oral transfer of knowledge, with the risk of losing critical knowledge. Moreover, practices differ according to the regions and the availability of medicinal plants. Therefore, it is necessary to compile tacit, disseminated and complex knowledge from various Tradi-Practitioners (TP) in order to determine interesting patterns for treating a given disease. Knowledge engineering methods for traditional medicine are useful to model suitably complex information needs, formalize knowledge of domain experts and highlight the effective practices for their integration to conventional medicine. The work described in this paper presents an approach which addresses two issues. First it aims at proposing a formal representation model of ATM knowledge and practices to facilitate their sharing and reusing. Then, it aims at providing a visual reasoning mechanism for selecting best available procedures and medicinal plants to treat diseases. The approach is based on the use of the Delphi method for capturing knowledge from various experts which necessitate reaching a consensus. Conceptual graph formalism is used to model ATM knowledge with visual reasoning capabilities and processes. The nested conceptual graphs are used to visually express the semantic meaning of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) constructs that are useful for formal specification of temporal properties of ATM domain knowledge. Our approach presents the advantage of mitigating knowledge loss with conceptual development assistance to improve the quality of ATM care (medical diagnosis and therapeutics), but also patient safety (drug monitoring)

The Politics of Public Health: A Response to Epstein

Conservatives are taking aim at the field of public health, targeting its efforts to understand and control environmental and social causes of disease. Richard Epstein and others contend that these efforts in fact undermine people’s health and well-being by eroding people’s incentives to create economic value. Public health, they argue, should stick to its traditional task—the struggle against infectious diseases. Because markets are not up to the task of controlling the transmission of infectious disease, Epstein says, coercive government action is required. But market incentives, not state action, he asserts, represent our best hope for controlling the chronic illnesses that are the main causes of death in industrialized nations. In this article, we assess Epstein’s case. We consider his claims about the market’s capabilities and limits, the roles of personal choice and social influences in spreading disease, and the relationship between health and economic inequality. We argue that Epstein’s critique of public health overreaches, oversimplifies, and veils his political and moral preferences behind seemingly objective claims about the economics of disease control and the determinants of disease spread. Public health policy requires political and moral choices, but these choices should be transparent

5. Pathologizing Poverty

This chapter looks at the pathologisation of poverty in the context of the New Poor Law (1834), its afterlife and the establishment of the Public Health Act (1848). It seeks to establish the connection between idioms of writing disease and the political process of pathologizing destitution—through the historical contiguity between discourses of disease and charity/relief. Taking Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as a point of entry to look at the interchanges and the slippages between metaphorical and material uses of contagion, I examine closely the resonances of that metaphorical exchange in the Poor Law Commissioners’ Report (1834) and in Edwin Chadwick’s Sanitary Report (1842), that reformulated the traditional relationship of health and poverty leading to the establishment of the Public Health Act in 1848. Disease becomes a form, a trope, even a narrative device which categorizes a certain group of population as pathological, both metaphorically and through the inductive reasoning of commissioned reports. Thus ‘contagion’ is no longer just a noun and a medical term. By becoming a metaphor, it acquires adjectival potency—‘contagious’—through synonymous exchanges and thereby slips through generic specificities. Nonetheless, the metaphorical weight of what is diagnosed as ‘contagious’, especially within the framework of a legal commissioned report, still bears the scientificity of a medical term and provides legitimacy to this report. The fact that the laws on Public Health and sanitation came on the back of the amendment of a legislation that was meant for managing relief for the poor shows how closely the history of medicine is tied to the history of laws. Keywords: Contagion, Metaphor, Idioms of disease, Victorian, Public Healt