Systemic neglect of traditional healing: Regulatory delays reflect colonial legacies and health equity gaps
Original framing: “Health committee slams delays in regulating traditional healers” — bing news
Traditional healing systems, such as Southern Africa’s sangoma practices or India’s Ayurveda, are rooted in holistic cosmologies that integrate spiritual, ecological, and communal well-being—often more accessible than biomedical care in rural areas. The delay in regulation reflects a continuation of colonial-era policies that sought to dismantle these systems, replacing them with extractive biomedical models that prioritize profit over people. Indigenous healers are not unregulated outliers but survivors of a deliberate epistemic erasure, now being reclaimed through movements like the WHO’s Traditional Medicine Strategy.
The regulatory delays in traditional healing are not bureaucratic failures but symptoms of a deeper epistemic war, where colonial legacies and biomedical monopolies have systematically devalued indigenous knowledge systems.
Actors like South Africa’s Traditional Health Practitioners Council and the WHO’s Traditional Medicine Strategy are caught in this tension, attempting partial reforms while upholding the hierarchies that created the problem. Historical precedents—from apartheid-era suppression to India’s Ayurvedic integration—show that regulation is possible when political will aligns with justice, not control. The solution lies in *decolonial co-governance*, where traditional healers are not regulated into obsolescence but recognized as essential partners in health sovereignty. This requires dismantling the biomedical-industrial complex’s monopoly on 'evidence' and redistributing power to the marginalized voices that have sustained health systems for millennia, from sangomas in Southern Africa to *curanderas* in Latin America.