7-6
Problems follow when any group of people, regardless of how well
intending, imposes or forces its ideas on another group of people.
IDENTIFYING HEALTH-PROTECTING CUSTOMS
The challenge for the health worker or educator is not to ‘change people’s behavior’.
It is to help people understand, respect, and build on what is healthy in their own
culture.
Every area has unique traditions and customs that protect health. Encourage health
workers to identify the beneficial customs in their own villages. Here are a few
examples from different parts of the world:
In Guatemala, village midwives put a
hot coal against the freshly cut cord of
a newborn baby. In other pans of the
world, midwives press a red-hot knife
against the cord.
In Mexico, long before penicillin
had been discovered, villagers were
treating women with ‘childbed fever’
by giving them a tea brewed from the
underground fungus gardens of leaf-
cutting ants.
These practices kill germs and help dry
out the cord, preventing tetanus.
It is likely that this fungus is related to
penicillin.
In several parts of the world, people use
bee’s honey to treat burns.
The thin sac or membrane (amnion)
attached to the placenta, or afterbirth,
has long been used in Africa to help heal
chronic wounds and ulcers.
The concentrated sugar in honey
prevents bacterial growth. Recently,
doctors have been experimenting with
similar treatment of burns.
Recent studies have shown that the
amnion has powerful healing properties.
It is now being used in some hospitals for
treatment of ‘ulcers that don’t heal’.
In West Africa, villagers eat yams during most of the year.
But during the rainy harvest season, eating yams is ‘taboo’.
Scientists have found that this custom makes medical sense.
Yams contain small amounts of a poison (thiocyanate) that
helps control sickle cell anemia. This kind of anemia causes
many problems and sometimes death. But it also helps protect people against malaria.
So the tradition of eating yams only when malaria is less common {the dry season),
helps protect people against both sickle cell anemia and malaria.