Medicinal plants used by traditional healers for the treatment of malaria in the Chipinge district in Zimbabwe

AbstractEthnopharmacological relevanceBecause about 50% of the Zimbabwean population is at risk of contracting malaria each year, the majority of people, especially in rural areas, use traditional plant-based medicines to combat malaria. This explorative ethnobotanical survey was undertaken to document how malaria is conceptualized and diagnosed by traditional healers, and to record the medicinal plants used in the prevention and treatment of malaria, their mode of preparation and administration.Materials and methodsThe research was conducted in three villages in Headman Muzite׳s area and in Chiriga village. These villages are located in the Chipinge district in the Manicaland Province in Zimbabwe.Traditional healers were selected with the assistance of the headman of the Muzite area and a representative of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 traditional healers from four villages in the Chipinge district in Zimbabwe.ResultsIn total, 28 plants from 16 plant families are used by the healers who manage malaria with medicinal plants. The most cited plant is Cassia abbreviata Oliv. (Leguminosae) followed by Aristolochia albida Duch (Aristolociaceae) and Toddalia asiatica (L.) Lam. (Rutaceae). Roots (55.3%) are the most common part used. Most of the plant parts used to treat malaria are stored as dried powders in closed bottles. The powders are soaked in hot or cold water and the water extract is taken as the active medicine. The healers consider their medicinal knowledge as a spiritual family heritage. Only 25% of the healers refer the malaria patients that do not respond to their treatment to hospital – they believe evil spirits cause their remedies to failure and they would rather try a different plant or perform a cleansing ceremony.ConclusionsLocal knowledge of medicinal plants in the treatment of malaria still exists in all four villages surveyed and traditional healers appear to play an important role in primary health care services in this remote rural area in Zimbabwe. This explorative survey underscores the need to preserve and document traditional healing for managing malaria and for more future scientific research on the plants to determine their efficacy and their safety. This could improve their traditional anti-malarial recipes and might contribute to a better integration of Zimbabwean traditional medicine into the national health system in the future

A review of mental health treatment dropout by ethnic minority youth

New methods for child psychiatric diagnosis and treatment outcome evaluatio

Kiyang-yang, a West-African Postwar Idiom of Distress

In 1984, a healing cult for young barren women in southern Guinea Bissau developed into a movement, Kiyang-yang, that shook society to its foundations and had national repercussions. “Idiom of distress” is used here as a heuristic tool to understand how Kiyang-yang was able to link war and post-war-related traumatic stress and suffering on both individual and group levels. An individual experience born from a traumatic origin may be generalized into an idiom that diverse sectors of society could embrace for a range of related reasons. We argue that, for an idiom to be understood and appropriated by others, there has to be resonance at the level of symbolic language and shared experiences as well as at the level of the culturally mediated contingent emotions it communicates. We also argue that through its symbolic references to structural causes of suffering, an idiom of distress entails a danger for those in power. It can continue to exist only if its etiology is not exposed or the social suffering it articulates is not eliminated. We finally argue that idioms of distress are not to be understood as discrete diagnostic categories or as monodimensional expressions of “trauma” that can be addressed

New frontiers: a view to the future

This final paper first summarises some of the major themes that previous authors have mentioned. The first theme is their endeavour to understand human beings in their ecological context. The second is that they also adhere to a (health) systems approach. The third theme refers to the proposed valuable research developments. This paper then elaborates on three ideas that deserve attention as potential ‘new frontiers’. The first is Network Mental Health, referring to the clinical staging model that may solve a range of problems: a new generation of epidemiological research that accommodates cultural expressions of distress, mitigates response bias, prevents outliers in prevalence rates, increases the cross cultural validity of psycho pathological constructs, opens venues to develop transdiagnostic treatments by non specialists, and that may help to bury the perennial universalism versus relativism debate.1 The second idea is referred to as Community Intervention Capital. Arguing that we need interventions, beneath the primary care level within communities, as the foundations of our public mental health care system and as the crucial source of universal prevention. In low and middle income countries, this involves a wide range of community resources including: healers, teachers, community leaders, extended families and organised religion. Additionally, concerted action of all players could achieve a great deal. The third idea is called Mental Health Mathematics. Mental health professionals are ill equipped for sophisticated mathematical modelling. We need a new generation of research to study causal pathways, robustness and redundancy of interventions in order to improve equity, access to care, life course research, complex health systems and/or stigma related to mental health