Word: sekagyas
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Take, for example, Yahaya Sekagya. Like Okello, his history was shaped by medical trauma. As a teenager he was consigned to a mental hospital for visions he says were calling him to traditional medicine. "It was misdiagnosed and misunderstood by Western medicine," says Sekagya, 43. Although he ended up going to medical school--more out of contrariness than conviction--he also spent six years studying at a medicine man's shrine. Now he's the director of the Ugandan chapter of Prometra, a Senegal-based advocacy group promoting traditional medicine. Sekagya runs an outdoor school in a forest south...
...While Sekagya concedes that modern medicine is better at blood transfusions, rehydration and aligning compound fractures, he insists that traditional ways should not be dismissed simply because they are not understood. "A Western yardstick is the wrong yardstick to regulate traditional medicine," he says...
...also worried that expensive modern medicines may be smothering local knowledge, leaving the country dependent on foreign drugs and funding. "ARVs are not curing AIDS. They are improving the quality of life," Sekagya says. "Some traditional practices are doing the same. What attention are we giving to that? And if we come with ARVS and flood the whole system, will we lose those traditions...
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