Where There Is No Doctor 2011
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The Green Pages now include some additional medicines. This is because
some diseases have become resistant to the medicines that were used in the past.
So it is now harder to give simple medical advice for certain diseases—especially
malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and sexually spread infections. Often we give several
possibilities for treatment. But for many infectious diseases you will need local
advice about which medicines are available and effective in your area.
In updating the information on medicines, we mostly include only those on the
World Health Organization’s List of Essential Drugs. (However we also discuss some
widely used but dangerous medicines to give warnings and to discourage their use—
see also pages 50 to 52.) In trying to cover health needs and variations in many parts
of the world, we have listed more medicines than will be needed for any one area. To
persons preparing adaptations of this book, we strongly suggest that the Green Pages
be shortened and modified to meet the specific needs and treatment patterns in your
country.
In this new edition of Where There Is No Doctor we continue to stress the value of
traditional forms of healing, and have added some more “home remedies.” However,
since many folk remedies depend on local plants and customs, we have added only
a few which use commonly found items such as garlic. We hope those adapting this
book will add home remedies useful to their area.
Community action is emphasized throughout this book. For example, today it
is often not enough to explain to mothers that ‘breast is best’. Communities must
organize to make sure that mothers are able to breastfeed their babies at work.
Likewise, problems such as misuse of pesticides (p. 412), drug abuse (p. 416), and
unsafe abortions (p. 414) are best solved by people working together to make their
communities safer, healthier, and more fair.
“Health for all” can be achieved only through the organized demand by
people for greater equality in terms of land, wages, services, and basic rights.
More power to the people!