Transcript
Dr. Malefetsane Liau
Traditional healer |
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My name is Elanus Malfetsane Liau. I am President of Traditional Health Practitioners’ Council here in Lesotho. I started doing this job in 1973. I was still young, I had to leave my schooling and do these practices according to our customs.
Normally for the past few years, because of a little bit of ignorance here in Lesotho, most of our traditional healers they don’t call TB ‘TB’. They used to say a person is suffering from what we call a ‘Sujeso’. A Sujeso is something like a cancer which means through lack of medical approach, most of our traditional healers did not exactly know the TB cases. They can say to you “he is bewitched”, or “she is bewitched”. The prescriptions are not good ones, because they would give the person something to vomit. That one [the treatment] won’t be good at all.
This approach of disease controls from our government to train the traditional healers concerning the TB will help us a lot, more especially most of our traditional healers because they did not know about these symptoms before.
Let me make an example with me. If I have a patient here, it is true; they simply come to traditional healers first. So, after I have seen TB symptoms, the best thing is to refer him to the hospital so that he can get better treatments concerning that TB case. So, to refer the people to the right places, I think we will be doing something good because we will be helping most of our patients. People are suffering from many diseases so TB and HIV we can say it is these only two diseases that are very exclusive.
Like enough, most of the traditional healers are not business minded at all. But to do the right thing, that is their main worry, they are happy if they have helped the people. It is just that for some past years they did not have any approach of this kind here in Lesotho. As a traditional healer I am not here to make money. What I want and what gives me happiness is if a person, more especially my patients are getting well. Nothing else. |
