Collaboration between Eastern and Western healthcare practitioners is needed

Recent study findings from The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal stress the importance of culturally sensitive rehabilitative practices, collaboration, referrals and information sharing between Eastern and Western health care practitioners.

This study compared the views of 15 Muslim and 8 Hindu traditional South African healers regarding the etiology of cleft lip and palate, treatments for these conditions, reasons why people consulted them, and their feelings on collaboration between Eastern and Western health care professionals.

Within Western medicine, craniofacial conditions are usually treated in an academic hospital by a multidisciplinary team. Traditional Muslim and Hindu healers use prayer and faith in God, a psychological approach, and Ayurvedic medicine, a healing method that aims to balance physical humoral processes with the spiritual healing of the soul.

Eight of 10 South Africans consult traditional Muslim and Hindu healers in conjunction with or instead of Western trained medical practitioners. All of the traditional healers surveyed for this study stressed the importance of cultural beliefs during assessment and treatment of disorders. Cultural beliefs can affect the way people perceive the affected individuals and how they are treated.

While some obstacles do exist for Eastern and Western health care practitioner collaboration, a majority of Eastern healers are in favor of collaboration with Western practitioners because they believe that both groups have the same goal of restoring people's well-being. In addition, South African Muslim and Hindu humoral medicine is partially based on the writings of Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine. In addition, most Eastern healers are in favor of collaboration with Western practitioners.

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