Traditional healers are the first to be called for help when illness strikes the majority of South Africans. Their communities have faith in their ability to cure or alleviate conditions managed by doctors, and much more. A visit to such practitioners' websites (they are up with the latest advertising technology!) shows that they promise help with providing more power, love, security or money, protection from evil people and spirits, enhancing one's sex life with penis enlargement and vagina tightening spells, etc. Contemplating such claims, it is easy to be dismissive of traditional healers. But in this issue of the SAMJ Nompumelelo Mbatha and colleagues (1) argue that the traditional healers' regulatory council, promised by an Act of Parliament, should be established, followed by (or preferably preceded by) formal recognition by employers of sick certificates issued by traditional healers. Can matters be so simply resolved? What does this mean for doctors and other formally recognised healthcare professionals, and how to respond to such claims and social pressures?

Cultures and beliefs

The fact that a large proportion of the population believes in and follows traditional cultural activities confirms that they are a much-valued component of people's life experiences. They are part of peoples' significant truths that occupy the brain's limbic system (or primitive brain) where our fears, feelings, beliefs, and the four Fs of human evolutionary survival (food, fight, flight and fertility) are situated. However, long survival and large numbers of adherents of such practices does not validate them. Medicine believed in the four humours for centuries, and apartheid was made no less evil by most (white) voters at the time voting for it. Our thinking (cognitive) brain situated in the cortex responds more slowly, and its conclusions may not necessarily concur with the deep-seated and difficult-to-shift beliefs in our primitive brains.

In 2010 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), honoured for its brave activist role in reversing AIDS denialism in government in South Africa, launched a protest against a television programme that screened the 'Christ Embassy Healing School' claims that they could faith-heal cancer, heart disease and arthritis. Their action was prompted by at least two people dying after attending Christ Embassy 'healing' services and 'faithfully' stopping their ARV treatment, one of them also infecting family members with multidrug-resistant TB. (2)

Faith in religions or cultural healers shares powerful influences on the way in which humans are primed by nature or nurture to respond. Religions and cultural beliefs may also share rituals that are similar, e.g. circumcision is practised as a rite of passage for religious or cultural reasons.

Another council?

South Africa already has several councils for healthcare personnel, namely the Health Professions Council (doctors, dentists and related professions--physiotherapy, psychology, etc.), the Nursing Council, the Pharmacy Council, the Dental Technicians Council, and the Allied Health Professions Council (Homeopathy, Chiropractic, Naturopathy, Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, etc.) To add to these the Traditional Healers Bill (3) intends that a Traditional Healers Council be established to oversee the...