Natural Medicine Research

Despite Zambia's political commitment to promoting research in Traditional Herbal Medicine, the country has not advanced much in this area mainly because it needs a well-structured institutional and operational framework to facilitate such research. One key question that has often arisen is: Where should traditional healers go for scientific evaluation when they have a claim that they can cure or effectively treat a particular disease or condition? These Guidelines give the procedures that need to be followed from identification of potential remedies at the community level to the time when they are scientifically and clinically evaluated. The Guidelines have been adopted and adapted from the WHO document AFR/TRM/04.4 on "Guidelines for Clinical Study of Traditional herbal medicines in the WHO African Region" by biomedical researchers for clinical study of traditional herbal medicines. The ultimate goal of the Government is to integrate the use of Traditional Herbal medicines and Conventional medicines as a way of strengthening health care delivery.

We have been pioneers in the field of Naturopathic research, education and health care, developing our own curricula and training tools and our students perform tremendously in conventional government hospitals. We are also developing textbooks for students of Clinical Medicine and other courses.

Using local plants, simple equipment and basic extractive purification processing, we have formulated and produced award winning herbal formulas for incurable diseases like diabetes, sickle cell anemia, cardiovascular diseases as well as prostate and cervical cancers. Our major achievement has been a formula for treatment of HIV/AIDS.

These medicines have won awards at International and National Science and Technology exhibitions since 2006