Agency moves to standardise products of traditional medicine practitioners

As part of the efforts to improve health in the country, the Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency has decided to create an e-documentation programme, to document the products of Traditional Medicine Practitioners.

This initiative was disclosed by Prof. Martins Emeje, the agency’s Director General at the agency’s first anniversary, in Lagos last week.

According to Emeje, the initiative is to standardize and document the products and services of Traditional Medicine Practitioners, and the products available even outside Nigeria.

In his words “Traditional medicine is peculiar to each environment and this means that our job and responsibility is to work together with the traditional medical practitioners to render services to communities through standardisation.

“We have a programme starting in Lagos State where we are going to document every traditional medical practitioner, the services they render, and products they provide, as well as digitalised such so that from anywhere in the world when you want to have information or access to any traditional medical practitioner, you can do it on the touch of a button.”

He explained further by citing the importance of traditional medicines, even though some people downplay the significance of traditionl medicines

He said “we depend on the knowledge of these traditional medical practitioners, the folkloric knowledge they provide and their traditional medicine is peculiar to the culture.

“We have decided that the era of people trying to belittle or disrespect traditional medical practitioners is gone”.