The Interrelationship Between Scientific And Traditional Medical Systems. A Study Of Ghana.

Abstract

The study was devoted to the investigation of a common phenomenon in developing countries - i.e., the co-presence of scientific and traditional medical systems. The aim was to explicate the nature of the interrelationship between scientific and traditional medical systems, to discover the continuing functions of traditional medical practice, and to elucidate some of the determinants of the pattern of articulation between the medical systems and the larger society. The focus of the study was directed to Ghana, with implications for other developing countries. The study required a perspective which incorporated certain features of both a rational and a functionalist model. From the former the idea was developed that men plan consciously to take into account not only their successes but their recognized failures. From the latter, emphasis was placed upon the social system and its formally stated goals, considered as the main organizational ends. This perspective enabled us to focus upon one of the crucial problems in sociology: how a measure of integration, vis-a-vis the medical systems, is maintained in the face of inevitable changes from sources both external and internal to it. Methodologically, the study was limited to examination of published data; no primary field research has been carried out. The available data have been subjected to preliminary analysis in terms of the concepts and problems of contemporary social science. Four conclusions were reached: (1) that traditional medicine or its functional equivalent would never wholly disappear from the Ghanaian scene; (2) that the limited utility of scientific medicine in the area of psychosomatic disorders leaves a relatively permanent area of chronic ills within which traditional medicine may survive at least in the rural setting; (3) that an interaction occurs in the traditional setting between the two medical systems which tends to create a division of function between traditional and scientific medical practices; and (4) that a kind of pragmatism acts as a selective principle to help determine which method of treatment is chosen.