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The Health
Ministry has vowed to bring order to the mushrooming number of private clinics
offering traditional healing options, where some claim to be able to provide
total cures for even the most serious of ailments.
“If they
are effective, we will support them. If not, we will of course stop them,
because they would only take advantage of people,” said Slamet Riyadi Yuwono,
the Health Ministry’s director general for nutrition, maternal and child
health.
He said he
was aware of, and had often seen on television, the many traditional healing
practices in Indonesia that promise comprehensive cures for diabetes,
hypertension and even cancer.
Slamet did
not detail how the ministry would gauge whether a traditional healing practice
was safe and effective.
The
government is supportive of traditional medicine, he said, as long as the
methods are proven safe and effective.
Slamet said
one of the government’s health care strategies was to integrate traditional
healing practices with conventional medicine.
The
ministry official said there were now 30 hospitals that had integrated
traditional healing with modern medicine. Slamet added that the government
aimed to more than double the number of such hospitals to 70 by 2014.
He also
said the Health Ministry would conduct further research on which plants possess
medicinal properties and could potentially be used to make traditional cures.
“It is too
late, indeed,” he said of the effort. “But it is better to be late than never.”
He said one
of the problems with Indonesia’s traditional medicine was that even though the
practice had a long history, scant written records existed.
Abidinsyah
Siregar, the ministry’s director for traditional, alternative and complementary
health practices, said one way to rectify that shortcoming would be to
revitalize the Center for Traditional Cures and Health Services (SPPPT).
Abidinsyah
said the SPPPT was established in 1985 but had not been active for many years.
Revitalizing
an SPPPT in each province would also allow for the establishment of an
information network to share the various traditional healing methods practiced
across the archipelago. The network would, in effect, consolidate and
disseminate local wisdom.
“We are a
country with vast natural resources, but if we look into shops selling
traditional medicines, most of the products come from China or Japan. Where are
ours? This is what we need to put some order into,” Abidinsyah said.
Research
conducted by the Health Ministry in 2010 showed that traditional medicines
continued to play an important role in the country’s health services. More than
half of those surveyed said they were loyal consumers of traditional healing
potions, known as jamu.
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