Diseases and Healthcare: The African Indigenous Religion Practitioners’ Perspective in Ghana

Abstract

Issues of diseases and healthcare are very crucial to human life and survival. Africans have always sought to find holistic and impeccable remedies to diseases and sicknesses that disturb human life and survival. Africans being incurably religious have sought to employ religious perspectives in their healing systems. Ghanaians have from time immemorial employed their indigenous or traditional worldview in their healing system or approach to diseases and sicknesses. This paper explores the African indigenous practitioners’ approach to diseases, their causes and solution. It also looks at the traditional healing systems in the face of the Western approach to diseases or healing systems. This work is a result of a discussion of scholarly works on African indigenous religious approaches to diseases and traditional healthcare vis-a-vis the orthodox healing systems. It is the ardent hope of the authors that readers appreciate African indigenous healing systems and how they can be combined with orthodox healing systems to ensure holistic healthcare in contemporary society.

Keywords

• healthcare
• diseases
• healing
• medicine
• african indigenous religion
• traditional religion