Traditional and alternative medicine practitioners have canvassed its integration into the nation’s primary healthcare delivery system.
 
They spoke under the aegis of Nigerian Council of Physicians of Natural Medicine and the Centre for Research in Traditional Complementary and Alternative Medicine of  Nigerian Institute of Medical Research(NIMR) during the African Traditional Day celebration in Lagos.
 
According to them, the relevance, affordability, accessibility and availability of herbs, plants, and roots cannot be over-emphasised.
 
“This makes us the traditional medicine practitioners, and complimentary alternative practitioners (CAM) to closest to the people in the community. And the patronages are high  compared to the conventional health services. Therefore, it is high time the government does the needful, which is to legitimate, control and integrates traditional medicine into the mainstream of the health care delivery in the country,” President, Nigeria Council of Physicians of Natural Medicine, Magnus Atilade, said.
 
Quoting the World Health Organisation (WHO) the NIMR Director-General, Prof Babatunde Salako, said it was no longer a news that over 70 per cent of Africans use traditional medicine as their means of therapeutic treatments to relief them of sufferings and ailments.
 
He said: “Proper regulation of herbal practice will go a long way in ensuring sanity and ethics in the practice. This will put stop to quackery, and the enormous reduction in the maternal mortality rate in Nigeria caused by one of the arms of this noble profession. This is because all the practitioners will be bonded within the law and the training and retraining of the practitioners will be enforced, thereby leading to a boost in the outcome of the health care delivery in the country.
 
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