The Ghana Traditional Medicine Practice Council (TMPC) has registered 27,103 herbal medicine practitioners as of December 2023.
The number involves practitioners who sell medicine in raw forms, facilities, manufacturers and spiritual herbalists.
Numo Blafo III, Public Relations Officer (PRO), who gave out this information in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), in Accra, said traditional medicine practice was still contributing significantly to health care delivery.
He said the practice was contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) as the health sector was working towards attaining primary healthcare and access to health facilities in the country.
Herbal medicines are normal and part of the food that we consume and go directly to attack whatever is causing the sickness unlike some orthodox medicines which will only manage the disease,” he stated.
Numo Blafo said, as herbal medicine practice flourished, it had become a source of employment opportunity for many, adding that most people now patronize herbal medicine than orthodox medicine, so, it’s now big business. “It is not new to us, we departed from it maybe because of the mode of practice.”
He said the Kwame Nkrumah university of Science and Technology (KNUST) was training students to become professional medical herbalists to sanitize the system as well as manage herbal medicine units within the government hospitals.
Numo Blafo was hopeful that Ghana could become a tourism hub for traditional medicines when things were done right.
He refuted claims that herbal medicines were giving side effects and kidney diseases, saying, “Everything that you abuse or every medicine that is abused, will always give you a negative effect if you take that risk without precautions.”
The PRO observed that traditional medicine had taken on a new dimension as most practitioners were using modern technology to diagnose diseases before prescribing any medicine for patients.
Traditional medicine practice is one of Ghana’s cultural heritage that was used to manage and treat disease conditions that ancestors were facing.
They produced knowledge about herbs, plants, natural resources, and parts of animals to manage the conditions of people affected by disease.
Even though the practice had existed long before colonialization, it lost its value and recognition due to the introduction of orthodox medicines.
Over time, traditional medicine practice began to flourish again, which led to the enactment of the TMPC Act 575 in the year 2000, with the responsibility of ensuring the registration of all traditional medical practitioners in the country.
It is also to regulate their activities by controlling and managing their practices to enable them practice in a safe and very conducive manner.
GNA
