Charlatans on the loose in digital switch fiasco

The three most watched local television stations have been off air for a few days now, forcing many Kenyans to watch the few remaining local channels to keep up with events occurring in the country.

Since I don’t watch too much TV, I was unable to determine whether the remaining stations changed their offerings during the so-called blackout, or if this is their regular fare.

Prime time TV on two of the stations included long interludes where they featured a certain fellow whose title is so misleading that it would be counter-productive to reproduce it here.

This individual claims to have a cure for almost all diseases under the sun, and even gives the timelines within which these diseases would be cured under his expert ministrations.

For many chronic diseases, he prescribes herbs that should work in a matter of weeks at most.

Apparently, no ailment is beyond him. From asthma to hypertension, diabetes to cancer, his herbal concoctions have the answer.

For this ‘blackout’ season, he had especially good news for his prospective clients. His ‘treatments’ were on offer at half price!

This man seems to have discovered the very elixir of life, the panacea to all our problems. In the past, he has splashed adverts in the newspapers making the same claims.

Many Kenyans have visited his clinics, including some who have mixed his concoctions with regular medications. Some of his clients swear by him, and insist that he cured them of one disease or the other.

BURIED WITHOUT A WORD

Unfortunately, in the unregulated (and in my view, impossible to regulate) business of herbalists and traditional healers, the only evidence available for their efficacy is anecdotal.

Many of their clients suffer from terminal illnesses, and only visit them when at their wits end.

Most of those that abandon regular treatments and embark on herbal odysseys do not go back to the “herbal doctors” to say they feel worse than when they started.

These charlatans’ failures are often buried without a word as to who gave them the last dosage of ‘treatment’.

Thus they are only left with the alleged success stories who, on closer examination, often turn out not to have had the claimed condition in the first place.

For every claimed success story, hundreds abandon their medicine and seek out “herbal doctors”, only to suffer irreparable damage in the process.

ACCOUNTABILITY

It is time the Health ministry started taking its mandate as the national guardian of Kenyans’ health seriously.

The mandarins in the ministry cannot sit back and watch as Kenyans are literally killed by charlatans making misleading claims that only serve to increase the misery of desperate patients.

A simple solution to this menace should be an accountability mechanism, whereby anyone making claims of cure must be made to produce the evidence to back his claims.

One must be compelled to provide an explanation as to how the “treatment” agent works, and produce records of patients who have been cured of the claimed condition.

Such records must indicate how many people willingly took part in the “experiment”, and how many actually achieved the purported cure.

If the “cure” is found to be more effective than existing treatments, it would then become the mainstream treatment for the condition.

Leaving Kenyans in the hands of these unchecked charlatans constitutes woeful abdication of responsibility by the ministry.

Prof Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine [email protected]