When modern health care competes with traditions

Categories: Opinion.

In Uganda many people believe in witchcraft and visit witchdoctors and traditional healers when they are sick. Although we try not to judge and only to counsel, sometime it leads to frustrating situations, whereby beliefs seem to compete with what is the right and wrong thing to do.

Three weeks ago I received the message that a young man of 24 was admitted to the hospital, he was suspected to have leukemia and therefore he was referred to us.

When I went to the ward to meet him I looked over his short medical history. He had been sick for 7 months, all the time he had been severely anemic, he had received several blood transfusions and has a grossly enlarged spleen.

Besides a HIV test and an TB test no investigations were done. It was assumed to be leukemia because of the anemia.

I spoke with both the young man and his mother. They had lost confident in the medical care, nothing was done and the blood transfusions didn’t make much of a difference. The patient was severely fatigued although still mobile.

The family was financially not as badly off as most of our patients and I asked them if they wanted to investigate the cause of these symptoms. This required some money for the tests but with diagnose there was a change he might be cured.

They both immediately agreed and some blood tests were done as well as a scan. It gave us and the doctors from the hospital already more insight in the disease. The results pointed towards an infection but extra investigations were needed to be conclusive on which infection.

The patient and his caring mother were updated, counseled and they said that they were happy that something was now being done.

But when our team arrived the following day on the ward we just found out that this young man and his mother had disappeared from the ward in the middle of the night.

Luckily we had contacts so our social worker and a nurse went to the home to find out what had made them to disappear from the ward.

When we arrived at their house we found only the mother at home. Quietly she explained that her husband was against spending money on medical investigations and that he had demanded her to return back home.

The problem however was not financial but the fact that it were medical investigations. The father was convinced that his son was bewitched. No medical interference could change the condition; as such he had taken his son to a witch doctor.

Both the medical team as well as our social workers tried to convince the family that medical care was urgent if the young man wanted to have a change to survive. But the father had made up his mind, a spell was cast upon his son, otherwise blood could not disappear into nowhere, only a witch doctor could be of help.

And although this was very frustrating for our team, there was little we could do. It was their belief and the choice was made by the patient and his family.

All we can do is to offer them advice and make sure that they know our door is always open if they ever want our assistance.

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