Ayodele calls for college of alternative medicine
Dr Isaac Ayodele, in Abuja called for the establishment of a college of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in the country.
Ayodele told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that a such college had become necessary due to the increasing demand for CAM services.
He stressed the need to have more choices for Nigerians seeking medical attention.
The proprietor of Ayodele Clinics said that graduates of the college should be deployed to government hospitals, adding that they should be trained in such a way that they could serve in various areas of practice.
Apart from the college, he said there was need for universities that teach medicine to run courses on CAM, while similar units should be established in hospitals.Having been a practitioner for 20 years,
Ayodele said that the services of CAM had become necessary because of the ``need to go back to nature as a lot of orthodox drugs have been found to be poisonous due to their synthetic nature''.
``There is a war against nature. CAM has a role to play in solving the health problems of Nigerians to a large extent.
``There is need to develop Nigerian medicine in a way that it will compete favourably all over the world,'' he said.
Ayodele, who says that his drugs were made from herbs picked from his homeland in Ekiti state, called for the establishment of a CAM council that would regulate the activities of practitioners.
He also said that it had become important to include topics on CAM in the curriculum of secondary schools, as observation had shown that the more educated Nigerians were the more they stayed away from nature and culture.
``People do not eat natural and cultural food anymore and that explains why cases of fibroid, high blood pressure, infertility, low libido and diabetes is on the increase.
``There is need for more research in African medicine because of lot of developments in the area has been abandoned due to influence of Western medicine,'' he said.
He advised Nigerians to stop imitating the eating habits found in the developed world on grounds that though they eat more junk food and get sick more frequently, ``they have the money to pay their hospital bills''.
Explaining why he was not a member of the recently inaugurated National Association of Nigerian Traditional Medicine Practitioners, Ayodele said that the group was more of a political outfit.
He said that the issue now should be that of ``mission and vision and not position'', while the emphasis should be on how to develop a new medicine for Africans, just as the Chinese had done.
Ayodele called on the federal government to check the activities of pharmaceutical and food processing companies in the country, as most health problems in the country had been traced to ``foods, drugs and the environment''.
He said that if the companies continue to enrich their products with sodium and sugar, cases on diabetes and other ailments would be on the increase.
Ayodele accused orthodox drug companies of conspiracy, saying that instead of carrying out research to find cure for ailments, they restricted such activities on the development of management drugs, so as to make more money.