Uniting behind a common goal: Collaboration between traditional healers and allopathic health care workers to improve rural snakebite care

Steinhorst, Jonathan, Tianyi, Frank, Habib, Abdulrazaq Garba, Oluoch, George O., Lalloo, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7680-2200 and Stienstra, Ymkje (2022) 'Uniting behind a common goal: Collaboration between traditional healers and allopathic health care workers to improve rural snakebite care'. Toxicon: X, Vol 16, e100140.

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Abstract

Snakebite envenoming is an acute medical emergency which affects hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, primarily in remote rural areas of low-and middle income countries in the Global South. A considerable proportion of snakebite patients turn to traditional healers (THs) for help, driven by a number of push and pull factors. These include socio-cultural factors, geographical proximity, and the absence or inaccessibility of overstretched and often costly allopathic healthcare services. Although traditional healers and allopathic healthcare staff share a common focus-the recovery and well-being of their patients-both systems operate largely in parallel to each other with collaborations being an exception rather than the rule. This is to the detriment of snakebite patients, who frequently find themselves being caught-up in the dualism between the two separate systems. Given the right circumstances, snakebite patients could benefit from elements of care from both modalities. Here, we have reviewed the role of THs in snakebite care and explored how their integration into the formal healthcare system could improve the implementation and outcome of care. The effective recruitment of THs to aid in disease control and treatment efforts in diseases other than snakebite underscores the potential benefits of this strategy. Carefully devised proof-of concept studies are needed to test our hypothesis that collaborations between the formal healthcare sector and THs are feasible and improve outcomes in snakebite care.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	WA Public Health > WA 30 Socioeconomic factors in public health (General) WB Practice of Medicine > Traditional medicine > WB 55 Traditional medicine (General or not elsewhere classified) WD Disorders of Systemic, Metabolic or Environmental Origin, etc > Animal Poisons > WD 410 Reptiles
Faculty: Department:	Biological Sciences > Department of Tropical Disease Biology Clinical Sciences & International Health > Clinical Sciences Department
Digital Object Identifer (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxcx.2022.100140
SWORD Depositor:	JISC Pubrouter
Depositing User:	JISC Pubrouter
Date Deposited:	15 Dec 2022 11:30
Last Modified:	28 Aug 2024 10:33
URI:	https://archive.lstmed.ac.uk/id/eprint/21388

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