Health institutions to provide space for herbal practitioners

Accra, June 28, GNA - Major Courage Quashigah (Rtd), Minister of Health on Wednesday appealed to managers of health facilities to provide space in their institutions for the practice of herbal medicines to give patients alternatives in the health care delivery.

He said this would contribute to the growing need of

finding solutions to health problems especially

communicable and chronic diseases that defied modern medicine.

Major Quashigah who made the call at the launch of a

book "Manual to harmonise procedures for assessing the

safety, efficacy and quality of plant medicines in Ghana" said

there was the need to find less invasive methods that were

more humane and would give patients alternative and hopeful

comfort in holistic approach "rather than telling patients to die when western methods fail."

The 142-page manual would enable the country to

develop safe and efficacious traditional and herbal

medicines of international standards and of health, economic and social benefits to the people.

It was co-authored by Professor Alexander Nyarko, Head of the Department of Clinical Pathology, Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, Dr Isaac Asiedu-Gyekye, Lecturer of the Department of Pharmacology of the

University of Ghana Medical School and Dr Archibald Sittie, Deputy Director for the Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine (CSRPM).

The manual has sections on safety testing, efficacy

assessment of plant medicines, quality assessment, purity

tests, reproductive toxicity, fixed dose methods, assessment

of anti-diabetic plant medicines and anti-inflammatory plant medicines.

Major Quashigah noted that a recent baseline study had identified about 1,000 medicinal plants with 80 per cent of them being documented. About 300 herbal formulations have been documented as being efficacious for specific indications out of which over 600 were circulating as herbal medicine products.

He said 60 per cent of these circulating herbal medicines have preliminary photo-chemical analysis and safety tests performed principally by CSRPM and MSc student project works and 300 of these products had Food and Drugs Board (FDB) market authorization".

He noted that the ministry was in the process of defining

an approved list of herbal medicines for use in public health

service and intended to collaborate with India and China to

send medical missions to assist the process. The Minister urged the FDB, the Ghana National Drugs

Programme, research scientists and other stakeholders to

speed up the process to accelerate observational studies

reformulation to standardized dosage-forms and pilot clinical trails.

Prof Nyark o said the manual was an outcome of a survey conducted by the Traditional and Alternative Medicine Directorate of the Ministry of Health, which saw the need to harmonise procedures and methods used by scientists to assess the safety, efficacy and quality of plant medicines.

He said the manual adopted by the FDB as a document

for testing plant medicines in the country had described in

the section on efficacy testing, models and procedures for

assessing the effectiveness of plant medicines against

diseases such as diabetes mellitus and asthma and also

certain disease-causing germs.

"To ensure uniformity and reproducibility of experimental

results, we have given guidelines for selecting and housing

animals used for the various tests, preparation and

administration of plant medicines, observations to be made,

data collection and format for reporting results". Togbega Adabra VI, President of POMETRA, an NGO, on behalf of herbal practitioners, urged government to come out with a policy to establish herbal units in all regional hospitals to absorb the herbal doctors being trained by Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

He called for more training for healers in their hospital settings to observe the clinical proceedings, develop well designed referral forms that would be accepted by all healers and identify more herbal remedies for treatment of other infectious diseases and diseases of public health interest.