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yyyap
Regular member
38 Posts |
 Posted - 16/05/2006 : 10:29:44
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Dear fellow docs,
I read with amusement the article, Concern Over Bomohs which appeared in the Star over the weekend.
quote:
When other remedies do not seem to work, Malaysians have a tendency to turn to their resident spiritual healers like the bomohs and mediums. Spiritual healing has become a thriving industry but unregulated, it has also become open to abuse. A number of rape cases have been reported – the most recent being a woman patient who had to sleep with a medium 51 times to rid her illness and paying him between RM20 and RM50 for each “ritual”. There have also been numerous reports of bomohs, mediums or bogus priests making off with large amounts of cash, valuables or jewellery after promising to make their clients well or prosperous. In the wake of such abuses, the Government has been urged to set up an authority to monitor the activities of these “practitioners”.
Concern is an understatement and way overdue.
I wonder what the collective experience of Malaysian doctors are. It would be interesting to compile for the sake of public awareness and to support the government in its effort to regulate.
What are your experiences - if any - of your patients who have had treatments from bomohs (or other traditional healers)? How did that affect the patient's outcome - for better or worse?
I can imagine that we could look at bomoh treatments that occurred prior to doctor-consult, concurrent with medical treatment, and after medical-consultation (i.e. defaulting). The effect of bomoh treatment could be beneficial, no effect, or adverse.
I can start with 2 common scenarios:
1)Neck abscesses - seen by bomoh and treated by massage therapy, resulting in rupture in to deeper spaces, cavernous sinus thrombosis, internal jugular vein thrombosis, and even subclavian vein thrombosis. I have seen patients post-bomoh, and also patients who defaulted and subsequently returned with mega complications.
2) Neck cancers - also given massage therapy, hence aiding the metastatic cascade; upgrading N1 metastatic neck nodes to N2 or N3.
YY
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Edited by - yyyap on 16/05/2006 10:30:41 |
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palmdoc
MMR CEO
Blogger
Malaysia
2020 Posts |
Posted - 16/05/2006 : 11:00:41
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The individual cases we see where disastrous delays in proper diagnosis and treatment are a result of seeking "traditional medicine" first are probably the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The particularly disastrous (and fatal) ones are those involving malignancies where early diagnoses would have meant better chance at cure.
Anyway I mentioned this thread in the MMR post here:
http://medicine.com.my/wp/?p=944
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rveerapen
Regular member
Canada
31 Posts |
Posted - 16/05/2006 : 12:14:29
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Ultimately it is the government’s responsibility to regulate alternative practitioners. I think doctors have been lamenting the existence of these individuals for several decades in Malaysia but there seems to be very little or no political will to act on it. Education by doctors, social workers of all forms and the media does not seem to have worked.
I suspect that some damage to the trust in practitioners of EBM was contributed to by an eloquent Hon. Former Health Minister. He once opened a hi-tech Neurology conference in PJ with anecdotes in his speech of how some relative of his was cured of an acute stroke only with Gingko! And how his secretary was healed of a spinal injury by a sinseh. And so on.
Regulation will always generate a proportion of health bootleggers who will be beyond any radar screen, their very existence made sustainable by the public’s own explanatory models of illness.
Well here is a contentious subject for more debate – what makes us, ‘Western medicine’ practitioners think that health decisionmaking by the public is a responsibility entirely of our profession? Innate paternalism? Or a pressing moral duty within the whole economy of healthcare in the country?
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Edited by - rveerapen on 16/05/2006 13:29:02 |
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Regulating Bomohs
