Afghan physician eyes Chinese partnership to legalize traditional medicine

Fed up with low-quality medication in their country, a rough number of Afghan people are still staying close enough to always use traditional medication, wherever available at the center and provinces.

The initiative to legalize an effective traditional medicine, if practiced, would promote a formal, legal and scientific traditional medication within the country's health sector to cure hundreds of people suffering physical and mental ailment, or diseases which are too hard to be healed by modern medicines.

During one of his few days stay in China, an Afghan head of Mora Hospital, Dr. Azizullah Amir, was inspired by a real physical therapy of some special Chinese traditional medicines as suggested by many of his visited museums and drug-stores prescribing legal, official and scientific medicines produced from various types of herbs and plants.

"We want to do something new, especially in Afghanistan, in partnership with the Chinese traditional medicine practitioners to promote Chinese Traditional Medicine (TCM) in Afghanistan," Amir, founder and chief of Mora Hospital, told Xinhua in an interview, adding that he was fully determined to do that.

Though it is still a theory, Amir was confident that he could put it into practice in his country, rich with medicinal herbs, in a partnership with Chinese experts interested in investment to development the folk remedy.

It is possible to reach the goal, as people have once been familiar with such a remedy, in the course of history, when there were no modern hospitals or the current up-to-date medicines, but how could soon develop and replace it with the once badly and illegally used such method in the name of Tababat-e-Unani or Greek Medication, in a country, with people of lower information about which one could alleviate their pains.

"It is very easy, we want to invest in this field in cooperation with Chinese specialists, work in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Health, import the needed laboratories from China first, and then launch awareness programs among the people to refrain from using poor so-called herbal medicines, illegally sold along the streets and some other stores," said Amir who hoped he would reach the target.

While visiting China, the Afghan physician said he had also heard from the Chinese people about how pharmacies in their country produced high-quality medicinal herbs, how the traditional remedy could prove with higher effective and lower side-effects and how traditional practitioners could cure people with physical and mental conditions through acupuncture and physiotherapy systems.

Amir has found that Chinese people have their own initiated medicinal technique, so he wanted to establish the traditional healing (Chinese Traditional Medicine) as a new health department of his hospital.