Illness In Sub-Saharan Africa

Historically, health practitioners used to work in communities with clients who had similar or same cultural and ethnic backgrounds to their own. However, with the changing dynamics of the world, the ethnic and cultural compositions of communities have now become cosmopolitan. Different cultures have different systems of health beliefs to explain what causes illness, how it can be cured or treated, and who should be involved in the process. The extent to which patients perceive patient education as having cultural relevance for them can have a profound effect on their reception to information provided by health practitioners, and their willingness to use that information. The question that then arises is: of what socio-cultural factors must …show more content…
Sub-Saharan African societies are more likely than Western societies to place strong and explicit emphasis on the social dimensions of health and illness. Stressing the social aspects of health means that when an individual falls sick, the matter concerns not just the individual, but the community as a whole. A society’s reaction to illness is directly connected to its perception of the cause or causes and the severity of the illness. Many African societies recognize not only natural causes of diseases, but also preternatural and mystical or magico-religious causes (Erinosho 1998: 19; Twumasi 1975:30). Sickness is not regarded exclusively as the product of a chance encounter between a human being and a malicious microorganism. In some cases, the affliction may be said to spring from the ill-will of an enemy witch, or the ire of the ancestors incurred by the sick person’s own immoral actions. According to conventional wisdom among the Dagbamba of northern Ghana, “because the disordered body is the expression of disordered social relations, healing consists of reunifying and reordering the entire group, of which the sick person is only an individual expression.” …show more content…
Diet, which we might also call a people’s ‘food culture’, plays a key role, though often underappreciated, in sustaining health. The pepper common in West African dishes has been shown to have antiviral properties. Changes in diet, which often result from contact with a new culture, can affect public health. One study showed that grain offered as famine relief to one African country coincided with a sharp increase in malaria infection. The grain was enriched with Vitamin E, an antioxidant, which decreased the population’s natural immunity. Before determining to bring local diet into line with a preconceived notion of healthy eating, our hypothetical health worker should first realize that local dishes can be repositories of community wisdom. He or she should not regard attitudes towards non-biological causes of illness as mere superstition which will fade with education. Even Twumasi (1975: 119), predicted that the spread of Western education would result in “an eclipse of traditional cosmology”. Quite the contrary, in much of the region today, both traditional and Western medicine are regarded as legitimate. Beliefs in traditional medicine persevere through even high levels of Western medical education. A majority of Nigerian medical students in their final year of