The Concourse
By Soney Antai
Engaging our emergency medics
There are certain issues that a columnist may not proficiently comment on. Among them are issues in such specialties like medicine, aeronautic engineering, high tech, among others, except they are learned in those fields. If not, a columist should see such areas as belonging to the ‘let the dead bury their dead’ family. Why? It’s because the labyrinthine web they entail is as cultic as it is esoteric, and so are best handled by their priests and initiates.
For today, however, this column is addressing something in the realm of medical science, but in doing so, would concentrate on the regulatory concerns that an average ‘Soney Boy’ would have little or no issues comprehending. The concern is on whether there is no regulation of advertising of non-orthodox pharmaceutical products in the country; and if there is, who are responsible for it.
In the Akwa Ibom State’s capital of Uyo, there are two rival traditional medicine vendors who robustly advertise their traditional medicine products opposite each other. They are constant in their presence, forceful in their promotional push and liberal with their puffery. One, who is often heard in other locations of the metropolis, has a shop on Ifa Ikot Okpon Street from where he dishes out advert message over loudspeakers, while his rival stations his car on the same street only a few metres opposite him. While the itinerant vendor deploys the local language in his sales promotion, the other guy uses pidgin to advertise his wares. One thing that poses quite a huge concern is that he occasionally deploys explicit verbiage that is repugnant to public decency and sensibilities and shouldn’t be allowed in the public sphere with kids all around. This leaves one to wonder if no law governs his kind of business.
One thing common to the duo is that they have nothing like noise pollution in their thinking. They howl over their loud speakers and turn the immediate environment into a shouting arena attempting, or so it seems, to outshout each other. Another common ground for them is that all their products are medicable, no dull moment! With deployment of some sprinkling of data from elementary biology, these vendors strain to persuade and convince us to buy from them. But they are not alone, though.
There’s an upsurge in claims by some persons in the social media about the efficacy of some local herbs, roots and fruits in curing certain ailments. With darring-do postures, these persons brandish the herbs in front of cameras and push them into the social media asking people to make use of them. Oftentimes, they issue no disclaimers to the effect that they are only offering information for education, but talk so persuasively that you wonder if they could lie so boldfacedly.
While it might be difficult to deal with every case, would it be too much for our law makers to regulate these abrasive incursions into the medical space without professional authentication if there’s no regulation in place as yet? Am I sounding alarmist whereas what’s going on is nothing to worry about?
Let us not get it twisted. There’s tremendous potency in our local herbs. In many instances, diseases that defy orthodox Western medicines often bow down when confronted with traditional medicine. However, the problem is often in our traditional medicine folks not knowing the chemical composition of their medicines and the needed dosages for them per patient’s vital stats. This is where the Chinese are ahead of us.
Our universities for eons have been producing pharmacists with little or no inventive capacities. Even where there are exceptions, Western imperialistic big pharma would use some of us to sabotage the traditional medicine men. The case of Jeremiah Abalaka, a surgeon-turned immunologist, who, in 2014, claimed to have developed a vaccine for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), readily comes to mind. There was no indignity big pharma did not throw at him. But did our government invite him to objectively, thoroughly and scientifically understand what his claims were about?
Medical issues should be handled by those adequately trained for it. So too must advertising medical products be handled with care. Allowing these vendors to harass public sensibilities with unverifiable claims of the potency of their concoctions is not in the public interest. The National Agency for Food And Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) should look into this matter. Where the traditional medical products are verified and found veritable, then they can be made available to the public. Government should take more interest in developing our local pharmaceutical research industry. It is this column’s conviction that medicines made from our plants are far more efficacious than what imperialistic big pharma concocts in laboratories and dumps here for us. Many of those drugs, as experience has shown, have too many side effects that they should not even be allowed into our country. But who is even listening?
