CUBA: Natural Medicine Gains Wide Acceptance

By Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Aug 22 (IPS) - The impact of Cuba's decade-long economic crisis on the local health system has contributed to a boom in the popularity of traditional and herbal medicine, increasingly used by the public at large as well as health practitioners in this Caribbean island nation.

"My grandmother used to give us herbal infusions when we were little, and we did ok, so when medicine started to be hard to come by, I remembered her teachings," said María Caridad Rodríguez, 60, while purchasing cough syrups based on oranges and oregano for her grandson in the local pharmacy. Rodríguez also drinks an infusion of leaves from the linden tree when she feels nervous or can't sleep. "I no longer need diazepan (a sleeping pill). And one of my daughters had a molar removed using acupuncture as anesthesia in a neighbourhood dental clinic," she said.

Sources at the health ministry said around 20 percent of patients attended by the primary health care system of family doctors currently received some natural treatment or remedy. In the first half of the year, more than 2,000 people had teeth removed using acupuncture as anesthesia in Las Tunas, 694 kms east of Havana. The anesthetic method was also used with positive results in hospitals in that province. According to official statistics, more than 327,000 patients -- equivalent to 30 percent of all outpatients -- were attended from January to July in Las Tunas with procedures using natural and traditional medicine. Research on the use of acupuncture has found that around 20 kinds of operations -- on the region of the neck, extremities, thyroid cysts, or hernias, for example -- can be carried out using acupuncture instead of general anesthesia.

Acupuncture was brought by Chinese immigrants to Cuba, where it merged with traditions conserved by African slaves and their descendants, and by the native population, in an amalgamate that survived the growth of the pharmaceutical industry. Studies have found, for example, that Chinese immigrants fighting with Cuba's independence army in the late 19th century used acupuncture in field hospitals. The tradition was not lost. But until around eight years ago, a mother who used an herbal remedy to treat her child before taking him or her to a health centre faced the risk of being scolded by her doctor, Leoncio Padrón Cáceres, the public health ministry's National Director of Traditional and Natural Medicine, told IPS. In Padrón's view, the "biggest reason" for developing natural remedies is scientific, rather than economic, because "any therapeutic resource has its limitations," and natural methods complement conventional ones.

But it was not until 1992, two years after Cuba lost its long- time markets and suppliers in the collapsed east European socialist bloc, when health professionals officially began to work on a programme to recover the use of medicinal plants and incorporate traditions like acupuncture. "Our medicine promotes health and focuses on preventing people from getting sick, and traditional and natural medicine is a big help in reaching that objective," said Padrón, who added that it is a perfectly valid alternative for poor countries. Moreover, by incorporating such methods, the ability of health practitioners to help people with their problems is expanded, he stressed, pointing out that the natural remedies do not come into contradiction with or replace conventional medicine, but instead mare integrated, thus broadening the spectrum of treatment possibilities. In accordance with a programme implemented since 1996, traditional and natural therapies are used in nearly all of Cuba's outpatient clinics, while 60 percent of the country's 30,000 family doctors (who specialise in primary care) are trained to use such methods and remedies. Padrón also pointed out that centres providing teaching and medical care in traditional and herbal techniques operate in each of Cuba's 169 municipalities, while central institutions have been set up for the most complex cases in each province. For the past five years, traditional and natural medicine has constituted a special field of study, and has been incorporated into the curriculum of local medical schools. "The battle will have been won when we have trained the entire faculty," said the official.

More than 1,000 locales spread throughout this country of 11 million produce the natural remedies which are sold in the government's network of pharmacies, some of which specialise in homeopathic and herbal products. Cuba's programme of traditional and natural medicine has been advised by Chinese specialists in acupuncture, and by Argentine, Italian and Mexican homeopaths. Cuba currently has one physician for every 168 inhabitants, 248 hospitals, 436 outpatient health clinics, 12,000 consulting rooms, 166 dentist clinics, 12 research institutes, 21 medical faculties, a number of post-graduate study programmes, and a national school on public health.

The colonization of the world by Europeans was not an act of Innocence.It was not a charitable act by any fantasy of the Imagination or any objective analysis.Entire cosmologies were dumped on the trash heap of a crusading European ideology that meant to plunder, not only the people´s mind,but their bodies as well (Reading,1950).The liberation of the minds of the African people will be a tougher battle than the eradication of settler regimes.

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