Medicine, though fundamentally a scientific discipline, is the art of transferring experimentally derived knowledge onto care patients. The clinician’s role to master precisely that process. Therefore, in addition acquiring strong command biomedical sciences, integral professional duty development his or her identity as healer. This first-person narrative essay explores clinical encounter betwe...

Adaptive software agents like HEALER have been proposed in the literature recently to recommend intervention plans to homeless shelter officials. However, generating networks for HEALER’s input is challenging. Moreover, HEALER’s solutions are often counter-intuitive to people. This demo paper makes two contributions. First, we demonstrate HEALER’s Facebook application, which parses the Facebook...

OBJECTIVE Although many studies indicate that traditional healers are willing to collaborate with Western practitioners in South Africa, none focus specifically on mental health care, and none use a theory of health behaviour to explain their findings. The present study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to predict traditional healer referral practices of patients with a mental illne...

Neem has rightly been called sarvaroghari. Since time immemorial, Indians have learnt and made use of neem in a variety of ways both for personal and community health by way of environmental amelioration. Its effectiveness is enhanced on account of its easy and plentiful availability and low cost. Medical properties of Neem have been known to Indians since time immemorial. It is now considered ...

There are few population-level insights into the use of traditional healers and other forms of alternative care for the treatment of common mental disorders in sub-Saharan Africa. We examined the extent to which alternative practitioners are consulted, and predictors of traditional healer visits. A national survey was conducted with 3651 adult South Africans between 2002 and 2004, using the Wor...