The Integration of Traditional Medicine Among Community-based Health Programmes in the Philippines

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Abstract
Much progress has been made In the rediscovery of traditional medicine and its potential for strengthen ing primary health care programmes. This is reflected In the non-governmental organizations' community-based health programmes (CBHP), which actively employ traditional medical practitioners and promote the utilization of traditional therapies. There is, however, room for further improving these efforts, particularly in terms of integrating tradi tional practitioners into the health programmes, without necessarily transforming them into ‘western’ paramedics. Workers in primary helath care in fact need to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of traditional medicine, linking cognitive aspects of health and illness to the traditional preventive and therapeutic medical practices. The policy of ‘promoting the positive, discouraging the negative and toler ating the neutral’ is easier said than done since labels such as ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘neutral’ may be imposed with ethnocentric biases. An important component of CBHP today is an intensification of research and documentation on the traditional medical systems that exist in the Philippines. Such academic research, linked up with com munity programmes, could contribute to the further improvement of health programmes and projects.

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