No funding for local research
AFRICAN traditional medicine faces unique challenges that makes it difficult to commercialise or export.
Ray Pogir, 85, curator at the SA Pharmacy Museum in Melrose Estate, north of Johannesburg, said although his museum boasts 800 African traditional herbs and medicinal plants and 1 000 books on the subject, it was expensive to do research on the items compared to chemically based medicine.
Added to this were tight control policies imposed by bodies like the World Health Organisation and Medicines Control Council to approve and commercialise medicine for human use.
Normally, for a medication to be approved it needs to pass scientific research tests and studies done on its raw materials and active ingredient by a relevant regulatory body.
“At the moment universities don’t have money to invest in research … This is sad because we have students who come here and show an interest in traditional medicine but unfortunately their universities don’t have money to do the research. It’s a sad reality because in South Africa we have more traditional doctors than Western-trained doctors,” Pogir said.
Pogir said there were between 100 000 and 150 000 practising traditional doctors.
“Traditional medicine is very important and relevant. It remains the basic form of medicine because that is where today’s chemical medicines come from.”
Most of the traditional medicines in the museum were collected from traditional healers across the country to be stored or analysed.
It costs at least R1 000 to have a bottle analysed at Wits University.
Before 1940, pharmacists would get prescriptions from doctors and then create pills to cure sicknesses. However, the boom of pharmaceutical companies led to the absorption of pharmacists into them.
The museum is funded by the SA Pharmaceutical Council. Pogir, a retired pharmacist who stocked African medicine in Durban in the 1950s, said besides financial difficulties, indigenous medicine also posed scientific challenges in that it was difficult to measure unlike pills which are chemically based and precise. “You can’t tell the strength of a plant by merely looking at it.”