Prof Adefule-Oshitelu: Why I went into traditional medicine
continued from last week)
…Says the Yorubas were the first in Nigeria to embrace vaccination in the days of ‘shopono’
…Says white men are not better than blacks
…I started wearing glasses at age 15 but now I can read and write without glasses all because of traditional medicine
In this second part of our exclusive interview,retired professor of ophthalmologist, Professor (Mrs.) Adebukunola Adefule-Ositelu, revealed how she got into traditional medicine using herbs and plants to cure varied our eye diseases and infections.
Excerpts:
Because the quality of what we get is not as good as what it used to be most times. The way God has lead me to traditional medicine is wonderful because if He had told me that, I will argue with Him, I keep telling them, none of them is more orthodox than I am but I have seen the two sides and I appreciate God for what He has done for me. I went to my mum again, there was a particular song they were singing ‘owon ti afi egbo ati ewe fi she laye mi, fi eje re tuka, Jesu fi eje re tuka,’ my mum said ‘shut up what are you talking about? You are eating ‘ewe, efo, vegetable and everything, you are saying ‘ewe ati egbo ki won tuka, kini ki won tuka’? stop cursing yourself, I now came back sat down and look at it,even in the first chapter of the Bible, God created vegetations then you go down to chapter 29, He goes there to say, it is for your food, I have created the herbs and plants for your food and at the end, the last stage, the last chapter, Revelation chapter 22 vs 2 it is written there for your, the healing of the nations. Who are the nations, who are the people?
So, food and healing and I got to know that there was a particular king, King Hezekiah who was sick, he had a boil, that would have been a cancer, he cried, he prayed and God said he should go and make arrangement that he was going to die, he cried, prayed again and the same prophet that was sent to him before was sent to him again and was told that God has listened to his prayers and he lived extra 15 years. What was done was that a fig fruit was made into a paste and pasted on the boil and the boil disappeared and he lived another 15 years . Why, whoever brought that kind of song or chorus, that is not right, that is turning religion against itself because that is not what the Bible is telling us; the Bible is telling us that what you eat is your health, so I now faced traditional as a gift, a special gift.
Conventional medicine is okay because it is well organised, they have done series of researches, they have done many researches and analysis, they are able to standardise the dosages and everything some have even gone as far as knowing the side effects .
That is what we need to do to what we have, develop what we have and standardise it.
Go to all these European countries, they are not looking down on their cultural things, they are promoting their own culture, we are the ones looking down on ours, killing our own, calling it fetish. Okay, call it fetish but look at the white man who came and told you that everything you are doing is fetish and it is the same white man that came, remove your plants, gave them names, their own names, botanical names, worked on it, this fetish things, and brought them back as tablets, syrups.
Your own things that you are calling fetish, they have developed it into things we think is superior . I do not feel inferior to anyone, it is only the colour of the skin that is different, every anatomy is the same in the white and in the black there is no part of the body that is more developed than the other, it is just the colour so I do not feel inferior and if you study our culture, you see that it promotes good health.
Our fathers and mothers in those days were living up to 100 and I remember going to Ikenne and seeing some elderly people been brought out into the sun, they were too old. They will put them in the sun so they could get some vitamins into their skin, they were so old they could not move again And this was to tell you that we were endowed with good longevity, we were ageing very well but look at all these things that are coming in in modern life that is reducing our immunity to diseases, opening us to all kinds of diseases and complications. You will wake up in the morning, clean your compound, the gutter is flowing, so where will the mosquito breed? Where will they breed?
But now, everybody will eat and drop it on the floor. Thy will eat, drink and drop on the floor and block the drainages, some even build on the right way of drainage. That is where modernisation is not really doing us any good. Most times, modernisation is retrogression and now we have this, I am so happy about the birth attendants that the majority of our people still prefer to go to them because they believe they have some indigenous practices they will use. Think of it, look at it in the Bible, when Moses was born, the midwives, though, the king told them to be destroying male children. Yet, the king wondered why they were so many male children and they were like ‘the Hebrew women will have their children faster before we come, they had no problem’ that was their excuse. There is something indigenous in there and which we also prefect here. I think we need to go back to the grassroot and see what God has endowed us with and which we also possess here so that we process them, re-generate ourselves.
So right now, in Nigeria, as far as I am concerned, vaccination, started with the Yoruba people during the time of ‘shopono’ that was chicken pox and small pox and what they did was that they extract some of the pulse, wait for some time and rob some of the scartification on it, the person will be infected minimally, not full-fledged and by that they will develop anti-body. That was how vaccination started and white people got it and started doing it. Each and every one of us when we had small pox, it was scartivication. It wasn’t injection That was how it started, civilisation started from here That they brought religion here, enslaved us does not mean we should not recover .
Other people have recovered, Nigeria needs to recover . We need to sit down and re-examine ourselves and appreciate what God has done for us and develop everything.
I started wearing glasses at age 15, now I read and write without glasses all because of traditional medicine that God Himself led me into because I had already become a medical doctor, training as ophthalmologist, we were running clinics. I went to Institute of Ophthalmologist University of London, went to Edinburgh, Alexendra Pavilion for another year of internship or so just to gain experience and came back home and coming back I join them in running the clinic and all of a sudden, a patient who has been coming and would sit down quietly, he would not struggle with anybody but will make sure I was the only one he was seeing and I did not understand why, until the last time he was coming, which I did not suspect and he said he wants to give me something
will I take?
And I was like ‘ ki baba she ma fun omo ni kan to oni gba’ Why will a daughter refuse a father’s gift? And we both laugh, I checked his eyes, his vision, checked his eyes on the microscope and everything, he was doing well and I told him, baba you are doing well. His pressure was okay because he had glaucoma As I was going to write the report, he said I told you I was going to give you something and he said don’t bother to write any prescription for me because I have not been using your drugs. I have been coming to the hospital just to make sure the drugs I have been using are working well and that this is a family problem and I said okay. Then he told me what he was using, how he use them and how he prepares them, I jotted them down and said thank you and that was the last time I saw him
And when it came to my turn I did research on it
What year was that?
That was in 1983
Was that the turning point of the development of your interest in traditional medicine?
Yeah, that was the beginning of the road to traditional medicine and I did not know
After how many years of qualifying?
That was 15 years after, we started with animals, different types of animals and dog was among them, we had to gag the dogs but weeks after, it started smelling and hearing us coming, it will dance and wag its tail whenever we are coming , the drug was lowing the pressure on the animals, all of them and it was widening the angles of the eyes making it easier for the waters in the eyes to drain, and we did microbiology studies on them to see if there was bacteria in it and we compared with conventional medicine, the anti-biotic and anti-fungal of those days even performed better, we now went directly to human medicine, we took those who came to the eye clinic with discharges, we took the swoups of the discharges and compare with conventional medicine and it came out beautifully well and even did better and we reported them. We did chematography and it compared very well The man was even boasting, ‘you have operated others, have you operated on me?
He said it at the Guinness Eye Centre at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH, we moved in there in 1982
So it has been there for a long time?
Yes, after that we asked for volunteers and people volunteered; they are still on it till today I started using it, the same orogbo, so many people are now on it. It even started before NAFDAC (National Food and Drug Administration Commission)came.
I know you are now the chairman of Lagos State traditional medicine board, what has been the impact of your chairmanship?
Lagos State yes, the state is standing far, far well ahead of others . The traditional Medicine Board actually started 42 years ago in Lagos by Dr. Joseph Lambo during the time of Alhaji Lateef Jakande until it came, to Dr Bunmi Omosehindemi, he was the one there when I got more involved and I got involved because of my inaugural lecture in Idi-Araba. The university had already announced it in the newspaper that there is going to be an inaugural lecture ‘Maintenance and Sustenance of the Eyes’ and it was more of natural medicine They came in large numbers. Prof Akinadewo was among them so after the lecture, they insisted that they must have a photograph with me and invited me to their meeting and that was how they trapped me and I started having meeting with them and when Prof Akinadewo died they said I should take over from him. In taking over from him, I thought there was no way I should be dealing with practitioners without training them. The first thing I did was to train them. That was in 2010, so I organised training and invited MDAs, Lagos State Traditional Medicine, all of them involved. Including police and consumer rights; I did six weeks training for them and after that they exhibited and people were calling to purchase well prepared products from them. I now discovered that most of the practitioners were not registered and I took all of them down to Onikan and they were all registered. January 2020 I saw a letter that I have been appointed Chairman Lagos State traditional Medicine. I did not apply, maybe Dr Omosehindemi suggested my name or what they have seen in the papers. Like I was saying, Lagos State stands out because it has establish itself. Then WHO definition recognises that ‘people who are not practicing conventional medicine are also allowed in the health medical system.’ They call them traditional or or complementary or alternative medicine and they also have branches and they have specialties just like you have in orthodox. You have herb sellers, traditional birth attendants, bone setters and so on. So that was how we got ourselves involved and so we now make sure that they are regulated, they must have a kiosk or a shop .They must not be hawking on the road
Where will they now be selling?
A kiosk or a shop
Are they going to have a stamp of Lagos State on their product?
The commissioner and the governor are so committed and they have promised us infrastructure that will have laboratory
To be continued
