This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Bill's forum was the first! All subjects are welcome. Participation by all encouraged.

Moderator: Available

User avatar
Bill Glasheen
Posts: 17299
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am
Location: Richmond, VA --- Louisville, KY

This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Bill Glasheen »

It's not as bad as it used to be. However in decades past it was difficult dealing with what some of us used to call the "chi-sters." They were the folks touting "ancient Chinese medicine" that had been "proven by thousands of years of practice." Somehow many of these proponents missed the fact that PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong had all switched over to evidence-based medical practices. But damn the evidence; we have herbs to sell and bad chi to manipulate. It's funny when it's harmless; it's criminal when it's not.

It isn't just the Chinese and the African witch doctors who are practicing voodoo medicine. Our own brand of faith healers exist as well, and the consequences of their ignorance can be just as deadly. Note below.

Moral of the story - ignorance kills.

- Bill
WSJ wrote: Africa’s Village Healers Complicate Ebola Fight
In Sierra Leone, Traditional Treatments and Death of a Woman Who Resisted Outside Help Fostered Outbreak

By PETER WONACOTT
Nov. 17, 2014 6:53 p.m. ET

KAILAHUN, Sierra Leone—When a Red Cross volunteer visited this impoverished border district in mid-May to warn about the spread of Ebola, he faced a formidable adversary: the village healer.

Surbeh Alpha, the 25-year-old youth chairman of the Red Cross chapter in Kailahun, was advising residents to avoid contact with the sick and dead when the healer approached him. She had been treating patients coming from Guinea, rubbing tree-leaf mud packs on feverish bodies. Villagers, he learned, feared he and his colleagues had come to steal internal organs—a rumor health workers suspected she had cooked up to protect her business. Staring hard at Mr. Alpha, she challenged why he had come to the village.

“We’re doing Ebola sensitization,” he replied.

“That’s what I’m doing,” she retorted, Mr. Alpha recounted. “You are just telling lies.”

Weeks later, the village healer was dead and the government of Sierra Leone—where a surgeon contracted the disease and became the U.S.’s second fatality on Monday—had announced its own Ebola outbreak that stemmed from her funeral, according to local health workers and a paper later published in Science. The death of the healer, whom another local health worker identified as Finda Mendenor, created a viral trail that spilled into Kenema, the country’s third-largest city, before moving into the crowded capital of Freetown.

Kailahun became a microcosm for all that can go wrong in trying to contain Ebola, but it has since become a template for what can also go right, after officials and health workers got residents to change behavior, accept modern medicine and break a chain of deadly infections.

An important part of that work has zeroed in on dispelling rumors and debunking miracle cures health workers say Ms. Mendenor peddled in the village of Kpondu, the suspected source of Sierra Leone’s outbreak. The resistance they met from villagers underscores a little-understood dynamic in the Ebola epidemic: Healers in parts of Africa—both herbal and faith-based— are often more highly regarded than those who come to promote more unfamiliar forms of medical care.

In that credibility gap, Ebola has flourished.

In Guinea, where the most recent epidemic originated, the 61-year-old doctor who heads the country’s Ebola response recently had to dissuade a delegation of traditional healers against using their formula for fighting the lethal virus: plants, roots and tree bark. Six healers have caught Ebola treating patients there, and three have died. In a compromise, Sakoba Keita told the delegation his agency would clear the delivery of traditional medications to Ebola treatment centers as long as he and his cohort allowed regular doctors to decide whether the products could be administered safely.

“I don’t think tree bark has been tested on mice,” Dr. Keita joked dryly.

In Liberia’s capital Monrovia, another Ebola hot spot, healers offer their herbal-based remedies at so-called pharmacies, although in a nod to the epidemic there are now jugs of chlorinated water outside their doors. Meanwhile, Ebola has torn through the country’s Pentecostal churches, after pastors tried to heal by laying their hands on the ill.

In one church just outside the capital of Monrovia, Ebola killed a pastor, his wife, an assistant pastor, his wife, and a prayer leader, as well as a pastor from a neighboring church who stopped by to try and heal them, said Rev. Kortu Koilor, the church’s only surviving leader, and a part-time health worker, who put a stop to the laying of hands on the sick.

In Kailahun, the Sierra Leone district bordering Guinea, locals blamed a rising death toll on witchcraft and organ harvesting, but spread risk by secretly cleaning and burying diseased corpses at night to usher them into the afterlife.

But now, the district is averaging new cases in the low single digits, according to estimates from Amanda McClelland, a senior Emergency Health official for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, down from a peak of about 350 cases a week in early August.

But Ebola is spreading elsewhere in Sierra Leone, showing how officials continue to wage the same battles in remote rural places.

“We have seen a massive reduction in what used to be the epicenter,” said retired Maj. Palo Conteh, chief executive of the newly created National Ebola Response Center told reporters on Oct. 29. “Whatever support is provided from United Nations, China, Cuba, you name it—the best facilities from U.K. and U.S.—if we don’t change our attitudes we will all be wasting our time.”

A new outbreak has surfaced in what was the country’s last Ebola-free district, Koinadugu, where more than 30 people have died from the virus since mid-October following unsafe burials, according to Sidie Yahya Tunis, head of communications for the National Ebola Response Center.

In October, the World Health Organization said it hoped to begin testing Ebola vaccines this year in a step toward rolling out mass inoculations. But the success of any vaccination campaign will hinge on local communities accepting how the disease surfaced in the first place. That has proved tough in places like Kailahun—where literacy is low, poverty high and ancient rituals bind together generations.

“It’s a virus—not witchcraft, not a conspiracy. All those things halted our progress,” said Joseph Bresee, head of the Sierra Leone Ebola response team for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s hard to allay fear.”

Sierra Leone isn’t the only place where culture and conspiracy have clashed with efforts to fight disease.

Scientists scoured the villages of Papua New Guinea to teach cannibals the links between Kuru, a neurological disorder, and the consumption of human brains. Muslims who believe antipolio vaccines are a plot to sterilize them have stymied global vaccination campaigns. And Ebola spread in Sierra Leone in part because of common burial practices with its neighbors, Guinea and Liberia.

Six countries, including the U.S. and Spain, are currently fighting Ebola outbreaks. But nearly all of the more than 5,100 deaths have been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Porous borders leave Sierra Leone vulnerable. Civil war came to the country through Liberia, sweeping up children in a conflict that killed an estimated 50,000 people between and 1991 and 2002. The Ebola outbreak this year in Guinea appears to have originated near the border town of Guéckédou, an area where people hunt bats, a suspected host for the virus, said Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist with the humanitarian group, Doctors Without Borders.

After the Guinea outbreak, Eric Moosa, health superintendent for the Kailahun district, scoured the Internet to understand how the disease was transmitted. He and other officials held cross-border meetings to learn how it spread. They also implored the district’s chiefs to tell villagers not to touch the sick or dead who may carry the virus.

Disseminating information turned out to be the easy part. Far harder was getting locals to accept it.

Soon after Mr. Alpha and his team from the district capital of Kailahun arrived in mid-May with their police escort, the local chief asked them to leave. The health workers were rumored to be peddling blood and body organs to foreigners.

“You want to kill my people,” the chief told the health workers, said Mr. Alpha, the Red Cross youth leader.

Beside the chief, said Mr. Alpha, was a woman of high standing in the community, the healer, Ms. Mendenor. Sulaiman Kanneh Saidu, a community health officer in nearby Koindu who knew Ms. Mendenor, said he suspects she spread rumors about organ-harvesting health workers to boost her healing business. Soon she developed a high fever, but died before being tested for Ebola.

Health workers now say her funeral served as ground zero for Sierra Leone’s epidemic.

Local women washed her body and some lay on top of the corpse in the hope “that her power would transfer to them,” said Mr. Moosa, the Kailahun health official.

Women who attended the funeral later showed up sick at the local clinic in Koindu, staffed by Mr. Saidu. His nurse, Messah Kone, fell ill and died on May 23. Two days later, a lab in Kenema confirmed she had tested positive for Ebola. The government of Sierra Leone notified the World Health Organization of an Ebola outbreak centered in Kailahun district.

When Mr. Moosa and health workers returned to the area to warn locals, villagers threw rocks at their vehicles, shattering windshields of two cars, he said. Fresh rumors had surfaced of an invisible plane full of witches that had crashed in the area, allowing a deadly disease to seep from the wreckage.Parents and grandparents fled with sick children to other villages, spreading the contagion.

“People were dying indiscriminately,” said Mr. Moosa. “Had they not been in denial, we would have stopped everything.”

By late June, Kailahun got help when Doctors Without Borders opened an Ebola clinic in the district. The so-called Case Management Center immediately filled to capacity, said Will Turner, project coordinator in Kailahun for Doctors Without Borders.

Among an early batch of patients was the Koindu community health officer, Mr. Saidu, who had picked up the virus after handling a protective suit he had discarded. He recovered, but said his absence back in Koindu “left a huge vacuum.”

Part of the response to the outbreak, though, was a surge in community activism that began to erode the rumors around Ebola and misperceptions about modern medicine. The local Red Cross chapter in Kailahun recruited more than 150 volunteers to take these and other messages into the district’s most remote reaches, including the borderlands.

The community teams taught children to sing songs about washing hands four times a day; another was about not eating uncooked meat. The Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders trained locals how to trace potential contacts of confirmed Ebola cases and safely dispose of bodies.

Bockarie Morqui, 24, said his family asked him to move out after he joined a safe-burial team. Others resigned after their training because of the stigma of handling the dead. But showing up in villages with protective suits was the best visual aid to convey the seriousness of their message about Ebola.

“Every time we go out, we explain,” he said. “Don’t touch the body.”

By September, the cumulative efforts cut the case load in Kailahun substantially, even as it began to bulge in other parts of the country. By October, many of the new suspected Ebola patients at the clinic were coming from outside the district.

For Mr. Alpha, the clearest sign of a change of heart in Kailahun came when he returned recently to Kpondu, where he first encountered the late healer. The chief who had ordered him to leave the village had also died. But another village elder rushed up to welcome him.

“Let the medical people come,” the Red Cross worker said he was told. “We are not denying it anymore.”

—David Gauthier-Villars
in Conakry, Guinea,
and Drew Hinshaw
in Monrovia, Liberia,
contributed to this article.

Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com
User avatar
Bill Glasheen
Posts: 17299
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am
Location: Richmond, VA --- Louisville, KY

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Bill Glasheen »

Those of us who seek out evidence to back up our practices - whether they be clinicians or reality-based self-defense proponents - often don't win popularity contests. The well-worn path usually works because it has survived time. But the well-worn path isn't always the best path - especially if it hasn't been tested by the extreme cruelty of Nature.

Tradition and folklore work in a safe world where dumb choices have little consequence. But when the poo hits the rotating propeller, it's the evidence-based paths which increase your chance of survival. No... it isn't always apparent what those evidence-based methods are. That's why we need the leaders to push the envelope and test our understandings of the world around us. And then we need the movers and shakers (e.g. a Van Canna) to challenge our faith in comfortable beliefs, and work towards positive changes.

Do "the experts" ever get it wrong? All the time. That's the nature of being human. The survivors are the ones who don't take life personally. It's not about the best person winning; it's about the best ideas and the best execution of said ideas.

- Bill
User avatar
Van Canna
Posts: 57244
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Van Canna »

Good post Bill, and thanks for the tag.

It is unreal how some people can be damn stupid...but then, I am convinced that it is nature's ploy to whittle the human herd.

Same as in the 'overly confident' martial artists...ready to take on his fellow practitioners and the 'world at large' ...

Here the 'coldest water buckets' pour from the excellent books of our friend Rory Miller, that cause many 'knotted' panties.
Van
User avatar
Glenn
Posts: 2186
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2001 6:01 am
Location: Lincoln, Nebraska

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Glenn »

Perfect timing Bill, my World Regional Geography course is covering Subsaharan Africa right now and this will make an excellent discussion point to tie together some of the topics covered along with current events.

As for why these situations exist I do not see it as stupidity as much as the effect of momentum. In many cases, both in health and self-defense practices, what does not work may be all that is known. Then it becomes a sales job of convincing them of the need to change, and as any salesman will tell you the hardest part of sales, particularly in convincing someone to switch from product A to product B, is overcoming the status quo. The potential client is usually inherently drawn to the familiar and is skeptical of the new, and it is just easier to keep trekking down the familiar path rather than to change. And as the article implies, anyone who will lose (income, power, status) with change is not likely to go down without a fight.

Another thought is that I think there is something in the human psyche that is just drawn to the mystical. People seem to want to believe in the supernatural. Look at all the pseudoscience crap shows that the non-fiction cable channels such as TLC, Discovery, and History have to air just to turn a profit. That stuff is just more popular than reality is (real reality, not the so-called "reality TV").
Glenn
User avatar
Van Canna
Posts: 57244
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Van Canna »

Great post Glenn.
Van
Stryke
Posts: 708
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:48 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Stryke »

Great post could be in the analogy thread.

That's not medicine ;)

Plenty of folks willing to climb on the body even when they know better

The beauty of science being it changes when wrong
User avatar
Bill Glasheen
Posts: 17299
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am
Location: Richmond, VA --- Louisville, KY

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Bill Glasheen »

I happen to think that the people who climbed on the body of the African healer did *not* know any better. They thought they could absorb the healer's power by doing so. They didn't understand basic germ theory.

..... Germ theory of disease

As you can tell from reading that article, Europeans were once just as stupid.

The same goes for the Presbyterian "faith healers" who would lay hands on the sick to heal them. Unfortunately God didn't remove the Ebola virus. He did however allow it to pass from the highly symptomatic (contagious) to the preacher who touched the sick. And when the preacher got sick, the wife who lived with him got sick as well. Oops!

A good book to read some time is Undaunted Courage.

..... Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

Most don't know that more Native Americans died from disease spread by the Europeans than by mortal wounds in combat. One of the reasons they were so susceptible was because of their cultural practices.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by many abandoned villages on their way up the Missouri River. These villages were decimated by smallpox. Lewis and Clark wintered over in what is now The Dakotas, and spent the winter in contact with the Mandan tribe. A common practice of the Mandans was to share a wife so you could gain the strength and courage of a warrior you respected. There may have been a serendipitous benefit in that the strong warrior would fertilize the man's wife and spread his genes. That may make for a stronger and more diverse gene pool for a tribe. However with smallpox and STDs being common among these outsiders, this practice spelled death for them. It's no different than what happened in the San Francisco bath houses when HIV made its way into the country.

I've been quite outspoken on the WSJ comments section on articles about Ebola. I've known about this virus for two decades. The recent outbreak was pretty much predicted about 20 years ago. Civilization and transportation have allowed this virus (which hides in fruit bats) to escape the jungle and make it across the pond.

Just as people freaked out when HIV first came over here, so too did the alarmists start calling for all kinds of unreasonable restrictions on health care workers coming back from Africa. I told many people online (in the WSJ community) what would happen with the influx of a few cases (sorry... no doom and gloom), and I was called crazy and demonic. Even one of the writers wrote an article titled "The anti-hysteria hysteria" which I felt was a direct attack on what I was preaching. And then other writers started producing more thoughtful (evidence-based) articles. And then virtually everything I said would happen DID happen. Yes... this is a horrible virus. No... we're not going to have an epidemic over here.

Just as it is in healthcare, so too it is in self-defense. Ignorance kills, and knowledge is power. I appear to be brilliant and even courageous in the face of this disease, when all I'm doing is applying what I've learned from a lifetime of studying physiology and health care delivery. And while it's obvious that a Rory Miller is a very special human being (in many ways), his bravery and confidence are partially about knowing his material several levels higher than his peers and his opponents.

There's a time to put on the space suit, and a time to relax. Knowing when each is appropriate is the difference between living normally and being a victim of ignorance. To those who don't understand this disease, the evidence-based healers appear to be practicing magic. To the uninformed, it is.

But when you practice "magic" and begin to believe in your own voodoo, well all bets are off.

- Bill
Stryke
Posts: 708
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:48 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Stryke »

I happen to think that the people who climbed on the body of the African healer did *not* know any better. They thought they could absorb the healer's power by doing so. They didn't understand basic germ theory.
Bill I agree didn't mean that , meant how its interesting how people will continue to do/defend practices because of tradition and hierarchy even when they know better.

cognitive dissonance , selection bias , folks want to believe what they want to believe . and open mind and a critical one are often needed.

Seems education is a big part , good work on sharing the knowledge , we just don't know what we don't know.
User avatar
Feur
Posts: 231
Joined: Sat Mar 23, 2013 4:50 pm
Location: Banff AB

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Feur »

Stryke wrote:its interesting how people will continue to do/defend practices because of tradition and hierarchy even when they know better.
Careful mate I said something like that once and all hell broke loose. :mrgreen: :lol:
User avatar
Bill Glasheen
Posts: 17299
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am
Location: Richmond, VA --- Louisville, KY

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Bill Glasheen »

Feur wrote: I said something like that once and all hell broke loose.
So you and Galileo have something in common then. Imagine that!

Image

Maybe instead it is your fashion choices. Get with the program, eh!

- Bill
User avatar
Bill Glasheen
Posts: 17299
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am
Location: Richmond, VA --- Louisville, KY

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Bill Glasheen »

The first time I read this book, I hadn't lived enough of life to appreciate it. Now I come back to it often, the same way you come back to Book of Five Rings or The Art of War.

..... The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

It's kind of like rock music. As a kid you like the beat, the grittiness, the dynamic range, the chord progressions, and the melodies. Then twenty years later you're drive down the road listening to "Whole lotta love", and you hear Robert Plant scream this.

..... Shake for me, girl. I wanna be your backdoor man.

Something about the viscissitudes of life give you an entirely different ... um ... perspective. Just sayin... ;-)

- Bill
Stryke
Posts: 708
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:48 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Stryke »

As for why these situations exist I do not see it as stupidity as much as the effect of momentum. In many cases, both in health and self-defense practices, what does not work may be all that is known. Then it becomes a sales job of convincing them of the need to change, and as any salesman will tell you the hardest part of sales, particularly in convincing someone to switch from product A to product B, is overcoming the status quo. The potential client is usually inherently drawn to the familiar and is skeptical of the new, and it is just easier to keep trekking down the familiar path rather than to change. And as the article implies, anyone who will lose (income, power, status) with change is not likely to go down without a fight.

Another thought is that I think there is something in the human psyche that is just drawn to the mystical. People seem to want to believe in the supernatural. Look at all the pseudoscience crap shows that the non-fiction cable channels such as TLC, Discovery, and History have to air just to turn a profit. That stuff is just more popular than reality is (real reality, not the so-called "reality TV").
Glens comments were beyond astute

And my tounge in cheek comments yes were predictable .

but it's because I'm such a fan of the scientific method , I had good mentors , just at the point of becoming a karate champion :roll: and questioning the effectiveness of a traditional game I was introduced to Patrick McCarthy a heretic who's academic research and scientific approach has lifted him into the realms of acceptable to the main stream (well more irrefutable but that's another topic)

here is a man who managed to stare the tma witch doctors down , present evidence based medicine and do it in a way that everyone can sleep at night.

Being right first , or second or third is never fashionable , Glen pointed to why.

But basic principles , physics , mechanics , they are not different they are by definition common

the mystics in the martial arts are no different than the witch doctors of africa

the our style does it this way it is different , is no different than the shamen

while the ornamentation is difference , the physics , the scientific method is the same , structure physics , leverage , what makes it work is what makes it all work.

Knowledge/experience is never wrong , but understanding that knowledge is something else.

and unless folks get to that point , they will fall back to the mystical , they will appeal to the mystical

I just watched a you-tube clip were a high ranked credible uechika was moving people with his mind ..........

ok back to the regularly scheduled program
User avatar
Bill Glasheen
Posts: 17299
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am
Location: Richmond, VA --- Louisville, KY

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Bill Glasheen »

Stryke wrote: Knowledge/experience is never wrong , but understanding that knowledge is something else.

and unless folks get to that point , they will fall back to the mystical , they will appeal to the mystical
If you can do amazing things but don't understand the operating principles, then it *is* magic. Conversely if you understand and have internalized the operating principles, then you're no longer bound by the story line. You can throw the script away and start ad libbing.
Stryke wrote: I just watched a you-tube clip were a high ranked credible uechika was moving people with his mind ..........
I've watched women who could move me with their breasts. But once again, I digress... :twisted:

Actually there's a point there somewhere. It has little to do with fighting, but everything to do with the power of suggestion. In a student-teacher relationship, students are often trained to please the teacher. The bad part of this is when - once again - the teachers begin to believe their own magic. That can be a fatal mistake.

- Bill
Stryke
Posts: 708
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:48 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Stryke »

8)
User avatar
Van Canna
Posts: 57244
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 1999 6:01 am

Re: This is what your "traditional" medicine buys you

Post by Van Canna »

Conversely if you understand and have internalized the operating principles, then you're no longer bound by the story line. You can throw the script away and start ad libbing.
Solid post. The operating principles are fed to us in different ways. One of them being a chosen style of practice...another may be just a constant practice of randomized concepts mixology...until they ingrain...

if it is a traditional style that we choose to embark upon, then we will be 'conditioned to operate' along the lines of force and directions and dedicated concepts that are part of it.

All traditional styles concepts manifest in Kata/Kihon_

I am not convinced that all of us really understand all those concepts as an embodiment of the particular style transmitted by a certain way of kata practice.

Rory Miller, in my view, understands it all_ better than anyone else, especially as it relates to concepts applications to real violence...not sport violence and not 'dojo violence'...

If you have Rory's book 'Meditations on Violence' read page 114...most excellent views on traditional kata.
Van
Post Reply

Return to “Bill Glasheen's Dojo Roundtable”