Elevating Traditional Medicine

Bright Simmons on adopting policies supportive of herbal medicine a key component of "indigenous industrial systems":

The policy in many African nowadays is to deemphasise brands and wherever possible to promote generics in order to rationalise costs and improve access (see an interesting take on the matter from Australia). For herbal medicines to attain the status of admission into national treatment regimes will require an unprecedented effort at standardization (see a common view from India).Ghana, for instance, has developed a basic herbal “pharmacopoeia”, which is in essence an inventory of plants and their well-tested medicinal properties. Such efforts would need to be intensified. Because until there is a clear record of carefully and systematically collated body of evidence tying some properly defined plant compound to medicinal outcomes, the integration of herbal medicines into the orthodox healthcare system would not be possible.