Africa Focus Debates on Contemporary Contentious Biomedical Issues

Chapter Six

101 Chapter Six Advertising in African Traditional Medicine This chapter critically examines the morality of advertising by practitioners in spiritual healing and herbal medicine heretofore referred to as traditional medicine, in southern African urban societies. While the subject of traditional medicine has been heavily contested in medical studies in the last few decades, the monumental studies on the subject have emphasised the place of traditional medicine in basic health services. Insignificant attention has been devoted to examine the ethical problems associated with traditional medicine advertising. Critical look at the worthiness of some advertising strategies used by has been largely ignored. Yet, though advertising is key to helping traditional medicine practitioners’ products and services known by prospective customers, this research registers a number of morally negative effects that seem to outweigh the merits that the activity brings to prospective customers. The work adopts southern African urban societies, and in particular Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe as particular references. The choice of the trio is not accidental, but based on the fact that these countries have in the last few decades been flooded with traditional medicine practitioners/traditional healers from within the continent and from abroad. Most of these practitioners use immoral advertising strategies in communicating to the public the products and services they offer. It is against this background that this work examines the morality of advertising strategies deployed by practitioners in launching their products and services. To examine the moral worthiness of the advertising 102 strategies used by traditional medical practitioners, I used qualitative analysis of street adverts as well as electronic and print media. From the results obtained through thematic content analysis, the work concludes that most of the practitioners in traditional medicine lack both business and medical ethics. That said, the work urges practitioners to seriously consider the morality of their adverts as in most cases they (adverts) do more harm than good. Further to that, it (the work) recommends the governments of the affected countries to put in place stringent measures to address this mounting problem. Background to Traditional Medicine Advertising Healthy has always been a concern for all human societies since the beginning of history. In the Western world traditional medicine dates back to ancient Greece and its famous doctors like Hippocrates and Galen. However, although all other civilizations from the ancient world were using plants as natural remedies for their ailments the first documented accounts of the use of herbs as traditional medicine originated in China.1 In African societies and in Asia in general, though traditional medicine has been used for centuries now, its use seems to have increased in the contemporary times with the advent of diseases like HIV/Aids. In the African continent, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe are some of the countries in the fore on the use of traditional medicine. In these countries, socio-economic and political pressures in addition to the prevalence of deadly diseases such as HIV/Aids contribute to the use of traditional medicine. This is to say that the use of traditional medicine 103 has reached an advanced stage in southern Africa in the last few decades mainly through medical traditional practitioners/traditional healers. Having made the same observation, Olapade notes that there has been a global resurgence in traditional medicine in the last ten years probably because of many of the known synthetic drugs in allopathic or Western medicines for the treatment of various ailments are failing or that the causes of these various diseases are developing resistance to the known drugs.2 Besides, in southern African societies like Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe traditional medicine healing has been associated with witchcraft, hence viewed with negative and pejorative connotations. This has been chiefly because of Eurocentric paradigms of Africa where the perjured interpretations of Africa have remained grafted on the mental processes and human aspirations of modern Africans thereby robbing them of their intellectual confidence and mental identities with regard to posterity. Unfortunately, many traditional medicine practitioners have stretched this kind of thinking further through their immoral advertising strategies. However, as previously highlighted the massive sociocultural , economic and political changes in southern Africa since the attainment of political independence have generated immense pressure on the post-colonial states to provide primary health care for all. These changes have brought in renewed socio-economic challenges in the region. Consequently, many people have resorted to traditional medicine; “the role and efficacy of traditional medicine and...