50pc rural people seek home remedies for illness
Says ICDDR, B study
Half of the rural people, consisting over 70 percent of the country's population, do not seek treatment for illnesses because of poverty, ignorance, distant barriers and cultural shyness, reveals a study of ICDDR, B.
The study conducted by the center's Social and Behavioral Sciences Division in rural settings says 53 percent of the rural people, of low-income group in general, possess insufficient money to consult a healthcare provider. They depend on home remedies to come round automatically over time.
It says majority of the people seeking treatment mostly depend on quacks like allopathic village doctors, homeopath practitioners, paramedics, 'kabiraj' as well traditional and religious healers.
Only one in seven people seeking treatment go to qualified MBBS doctors, says the study. The research was conducted over 6,183 individuals in Chakaria under Cox's Bazar to know the type of diseases villagers suffer from and their health- seeking behaviour.
Funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) of The United Kingdom, the study also examined male influence, especially husbands, over wives' decisions to report illness to doctors. It found that the decision of males around her, especially husbands, dominate women's health needs.
"Findings from Chakaria can be generalised for the rest of Bangladesh, where situation of rural health system is almost identical," Dr Mohammad Iqbal, a key investigator of the study, told on Thursday.
He said informal healthcare providers, especially village doctors like pharmacists and government-trained physicians, were found to be key actors in rural heath services.
Cold and fever were the two most common diseases in Chakaria, an area having a combination of plain, hilly and low lying lands in the east and the Bay of Bengal on the west.
The other diseases reported during the baseline study are muscle and joint pain, peptic ulcer, dysentery, neurological disorders and respiratory tract infections.
The gastrointestinal problem among the poor was higher than the rich possibly because poor people often miss meals, do consume excessive dry chillies and take unhygienic food from streets. The aged rich on the other hand were found to be suffering from muscle and joint pain because of overweight or high body mass indexes (BMI).
SMA Hanifi, an assistant scientist and involved in midterm and end line review of the original 2007 baseline study, said they have intervened into the area's problems. This was in order to check inappropriate and harmful uses of medicine by the informal healthcare providers, popularly known as village doctors.
However a positive trend was seen towards curtailing the trend of harmful drugs prescribed by the village doctors, he said referring to the findings of the midterm review of 2008-09 of the five-year action-research.
The final review is under process and is scheduled to be made public by the 2010 project deadline, he observed.
Dr Iqbal said healthcare seeking pattern of villagers showed that the village doctors are the most popular healthcare providers in rural areas.
As the country has a severe shortage of qualified doctors and it cannot be met in decades, Iqbal suggested that allopathic village doctors could be trained immediately and utilised to serve the majority of the country's population at minimum costs.
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