Despite current advances in medicine, many people still hinge on to several beliefs for treatment. When medical conditions such as cancer, epilepsy, heart diseases or schizophrenia take root in their lives they will not look any further for options.

Believers burn their midnight candle calling for divine healing while others use local herbs to cure for medication.

According to the World Health Organisation, this kind of medication is a total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness.

The question, however, remains, what could be the basis of this mostly explicable ideology of treatment?

"The basis for this kind of treatment rarely relies on medical evidence,” says Dr Charles Mudenge, the head of the mental health department at the Central University Teaching Hospital of Kigali.

Dr Mudenge says he has had a lot of similar challenges with mental illnesses whereby victims’ families have always linked the patient’s illness and behavior to some kind of witchcraft or misfortune.

Because of this, Dr Mudenge says: "The seemingly mild condition usually gets enough time to aggravate into a complicated one that is much harder to contain.”

The mental health expert also points out that, people are brought to the hospital after failing to find solace in traditional treatment.

Concerning schizophrenic patients, for example, he adds: "Patients are usually brought to hospital at a point when the sickness has been goaded.”

Just like Dr Mudenge, Dr Leo Ngeruka, a surgeon at Rwanda Military Hospital, Kanombe, is familiar with this kind of treatment behaviour.

"When some patients get infections or wounds, instead of coming to hospital, they rather spend money elsewhere trying to figure out the cause and solution to their problems,” Dr Ngeruka says.

"It is not good, because people usually treat what they do not understand. This is why we should discourage people from falling for such kinds of superstitions. Once we receive patients, we give them cards that we use to monitor and follow them up.”

However, Dr Rachna Pande, an internist at Ruhengeri Hospital, blames this kind of approach to ignorance by the patients and caretakers.

Myths in cardio conditions

Regarding conditions such as stroke, Dr Pande says many myths prevail for that matter.

"When somebody has a stroke, it is very frightening for the onlooker. The innocence often consider it to be witchcraft and spend resources going to witch-doctors,” Dr Pande says.

But there are some patients who prefer traditional herbs to any other kind of treatment.

Antoinette Cyusa, from Kicukiro, finds no problem in taking aloe vera extract every time she gets a high temperature during pregnancy

Cyusa says: "I always got fine after taking a few drops of the aloe vera syrup mixed with some other leaves and I didn’t have to labour much rushing to the hospital every time.”

Since she is not a stranger to this kind of medication, she believes that the herbs she always took were key to her successful delivery.

The cost of beliefs

Alberto Rukundo, a dispenser at Ivuze Polyclinic in Kimironko, Gasabo, warns about patients who prefer beliefs to standard medical procedures that, they are likely to pay much more for just a minor sickness.

According to Rukundo, where as some traditional procedures can work to a minor extent, medical proof of their efficacy is still limited and most would require a lot of research.

"The only way to gain confidence of recovery is by consulting medical professionals,” Rukundo says.

It should, therefore, be known that in pain both patients and care takers will fall for whatever advice whether a scam or not.

But where there is lack of professional medical consultation, diagnosis and examination, all wounds are likely to still leak.

health@newtimes.co.rw