Into Africa

Healers don't trust Western medicine, either. Researchers have come looking at their methods before, and healers have seen the herbs they've discovered and prescribed to patients for thousands of years show up as supplements in health stores. Rarely do they see any of the profits. And though they're accredited by the South African government, they still sometimes feel that they are seen as inferior to the doctors in white coats — mainly because there is still no degree program to recognize them. (Healers like Mhlongo are trying to have one established.)

• Courtesy of Kathleen Goggin

  

  Sutherlandia is the traditional healerÂ’s cure-all.

Details:

UMKC's Kathy Goggin explains in the Pitchcast how she went from growing up in the center of the AIDS epidemic to researching drugs used by African witch doctors. Listen to it here or in iTunes.

And click here to listen to Goggin’s interview on KCUR 89.3.

Subject(s):

Kathy Goggin, Bill Folk, Makhosi Mhlongo, AIDS research, sutherlandia, UMKC, South Africa

"Traditional healers didn't want to mix with doctors because they believe doctors will steal their knowledge of medicinal plants," says Elliot Makhathini, a liaison between healers and doctors at Edendale. "And there was a prejudice due to history. Healers were stigmatized, I think, for political and economic reasons," he tells the Pitch by phone from South Africa.

For Folk's project, patients needed to be more willing to work with the Western-trained researchers administering the tests, and healers needed to be more forthcoming about how they used sutherlandia and what responses they saw in AIDS patients.

"We don't need them to change. We need them to meet each other," Goggin says. "Most Africans will never make it to Western medicine without traditional healers, and we will lose the benefits of traditional healing if we don't make the two worlds talk."

Africans need Western medicine. The rate of HIV infection in Africa is the highest in the world. Some Africans believe they can cure themselves by having sex with a virgin. The president of one West African country, Gambia, has held press conferences to claim that he can cure AIDS by massaging an herbal paste into sick people and ordering them to eat bananas.

Goggin's first meeting with traditional healers was at one of their clinics. Each woman wore a colorful head wrap to signify her station. Goggin questioned them on how they measured quality of life. Did it mean anything if a patient wasn't sleeping well? What was a happy life? Did they recognize depression as a disorder? If they did, did they treat it? How?

Without understanding how they measured happiness, it would be impossible to understand how sutherlandia was affecting the depression that accompanies HIV infections. And without the healers backing the study and approving its methods, South Africans would never accept its findings.

For nine hours, the healers tried to translate the African concept of quality of life for Goggin.

"In Zulu, the first three words of a sentence modify the next word, which can be changed by the last three. So when you ask a question, it can be a nightmare," Goggin says. "And when you're asking questions like 'Is this a little? Is this not at all?' those are very hard things for them to qualify."

At the beginning, the healers had been proper and professional with Goggin. But toward the end of the session, the two women raised their voices. Though they were still speaking in Zulu, Goggin recognized the tension. She realized they were arguing over how to measure depression. It was a relief.

"I knew I was in," she says. "In this culture, you don't argue in front of someone if they're an outsider."

That you can get rid of AIDS by taking a virgin wasn't the first bizarre idea that Goggin had heard. She was 16 years old, living in Southern California in 1983, when newspapers started covering a strange new virus. Back then, some leaders wanted to quarantine all the cases on a small Hawaiian island.

The Goggins were a middle-class family. By the sixth grade, she was almost 6 feet tall, a good basketball player without many friends.

"I felt like a freak," she says. "I was taller than every teacher but one and the janitor. That janitor and I spent a lot of quality time together."

Her father liked a good argument, and the family talked about news at the dinner table. AIDS was a big topic of conversation on those evenings when Goggin was in high school. She noticed one story about a hospice in Long Beach where infected men were receiving care.

She went looking for the place and found it in an upscale neighborhood, populated mostly by gay men. It was a small house, with five bedrooms, a kitchen and a living area, run by a Franciscan monk who wore the same brown polyester suit most days. From the outside, nothing about the house revealed who was staying there. Men heard about it at homeless shelters.

Goggin thought the house looked cute. But when she went inside, the smells hit her. The tenants were in the advanced stages of the virus; most stayed in bed. They look like skeletons, Goggin thought.

Goggin visited for two months. She spent her time cooking meals and cleaning. Basketball was her way into the men's heads. She sat on their beds and watched games with them. She remembers one Lakers fan she liked to antagonize by rooting for the Boston Celtics. Eventually, they started telling her their stories. Few had any family. She got the impression that most of them weren't gay men, like the ones she'd read about in the newspaper, but intravenous drug users. Sometimes she knew they wouldn't be there the next day.