Prof. Olukemi Abiodun Odukoya is a pharmacist with PhD in Pharmacognosy. The professor of Pharmacognosy is the Head of Pharmacognosy Department Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lagos. She spoke with CHUKWUMA MUANYA on how natural medicine could be used to ensure universal health coverage in Nigeria; the setting up of Phytocare and AfriMed where Nigerians can choose to be treated either with conventional or traditional medicine; efforts to enhance the packaging, acceptability and affordability of herbal medicines; using herbs to manage patients with kidney damage, among other issues. Excerpts:

JOURNEY into herbal medicine?

I got into herbal medicine through my specialty. Pharmacognosy has to do with natural products and the natural products include herbs, minerals as well as surgical dressings. I got more involved with herbal medicine because of the demand for health. You could remember the World Health Assembly (WHA) of 1978, the World Health Organisation (WHO) embarked on an ambitious project to achieve health for all by the year 2000.

So during when I graduated as pharmacist I wanted to go into postgraduate studies and fortunately Pharmacognosy is the only course I did not have a reference in school. I thought I was good in it and with the interest I generated at the final year level. There were some courses on evaluation and I was the only student that took that course in my final year in Ife. Having developed that interest in Pharmacognosy I went on and specialised in Pharmacognosy at Masters and PhD levels.

After PhD, when I got into teaching, I generated more interest, one could not really say or pin-point where specified herbs or herbal dosage forms that one could prescribe or suggest to patients or colleagues or members of one’s family to use. So I got more interested as a pharmacist that if one could prepare dosage forms as it is done in western countries so as to improve on our herbs, to give Nigerian herbs a better image. So once it has a better image as to packaging, as to labelling, as to the appearance, and also to improve the quality of those herbs then you would have won the populace as to using herbs and also improving on health. This will end up improving the health of the populace and not treating diseases.

Why should we wait to treat diseases if we can make ourselves healthy?

I could remember sometime ago the Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, said he is not a minister to manage diseases but to promote health for the people. WHO realizes that for us to have health for all, the barefoot doctors, the traditional medical practitioners needed to be recognised, they needed to be promoted.

Chinese and India medicines are well known today but they worked for it. You know the Chinese were never colonised, they only went through a revolution. So they were able to protect their medicines both explicable and inexplicable and the medicine of China went into Europe because of silk. That was the greatest joker the Chinese had for their medicines to thrive. Pure silk is obtained from the cocoon of the butterfly. It was the Chinese that had the monopoly of that trade, so in introducing silk into Europe, they also took their medicines. You know Indians too were colonised but they were able to protect their medicines but explicable and inexplicable in Ayuverda, and so their medicines thrived. The Arabs, most of their medicines were spices and the spice trade also promoted their medicines.

But when our own colonial masters came, African went through an era of oppression called the dark ages when human beings were not being respected, how much more your culture and medicines; all these were relegated to the background. Years back, the African Decade for traditional medicine, which started in 2000 and we are now in 2013, it has been renewed. Some of the goals set then was for promotion of herbal medicines.

The National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) is really promoting herbal medicine by registering it, which is a plus for Nigeria. But my fear or what aches me is that WHO realized one thing, that we must use herbs available to our local circumstance. Chinese and Indian herbs are not available to the local circumstance of Nigerians.

We can use their technologies to improve our medicines not to bring their medicines to suppress ours. There is nothing that they have there that we do have the equivalent in Nigeria. Africa generally is where the medicine is; see the bush all over. Though we are still collecting from the wild, I believe that if we exploit the wild very well we will have health but at the same time replace what we are cutting from nature by cultivating medicinal plants.

Have you been able to package these herbs into acceptable forms?

We have Phytocare Health Services, which I am a consultant. We have medicinal herbal teas. It is located at Akiola Town at Iyana Ipaja towards Agboru. We have a full herbal section. It is a premises where we give our clients the option. If you want to go into pharmaceuticals, there is a full registered pharmacy there with a pharmacist running the place. We also have a full herbal section with another Pharmacognocist that controls the place.

So you have a choice if you want to use herbs or conventional medicines. We have also made it simpler. People that are going abroad queuing up to use affordable diagnostic machines for therapy. Some of these we have imported for people to use and be treated with Nigerian herbs.

The machines help us to evaluate the client’s health. We also have the massager and a detoxifying machine. We have machines that can detect breast cancer easily without going to use mammograms and they are affordable because we want to make health affordable to the populace.

Nigerians have gone accustomed to drinking tea and herbal medicines are best taken as teas because we want to take them as much as possible at ease. The best way to take them at ease is to take them in form of teas. We have them in tea bags that you can just infuse or if they are hard materials like the roots or the bags you can make decoction of it.

But as much as possible to keep our production line all year through we are using the regenerative parts of the plants like the leaves, the fruits, the seeds, the flowers. We also have the African tea solutions because we are thinking of taking our teas beyond the shores of Nigeria. Before the year runs out, we are going to open that company. It is registered as AfriMed that African Medicine. African Tea Solutions is a subsidiary of AfriMed.

Who should visit the Centre?

All Nigerians should visit the Centre including the poor, the rich, the needy, the healthy and also the diseased; everyone, young and old, man and woman.

Non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, stroke, kidney failure are on the prowl. Do you have solutions for them?

You know in herbal medicine there is nothing you do not have solution for. We believe that there are solutions for all diseases. We believe that for example in diabetes you have to repair the pancreas. So we have herbs that will repair the pancreas. These days too I am alarmed.

I have suddenly developed an interest in studying plants that can take care of the kidneys because a lot of young Nigerians are coming down with kidney problems. We have some patients we are managing. When I say managing, I mean that the patients are feeling well and when you do all the tests needed it will show that the patient is responding and you are pleased the patient is responding to what you are giving.

But some medical experts are claiming that it is the herbal medicines that are causing the rise in kidney damage?

I do not subscribe to that. May be when you do not take the required dose. Even conventional medicines have down sides. I am a pharmacist so I should not throw the ‘diarrhea of the mouth.’

There are some medications or some medicines, you think they are so simple that you take everyday and yet. Some common medicines are very damaging, they damage the kidneys and liver over time and there are some people that take them everyday.

There is this new craze about herbal teas especially the imported ones. Where is the place of our local herbs?

We are going to prepare our own tea, the African green tea, African antioxidant tea or variety of teas also to take care of the various ailments that is anti-hypertensive, anti-diabetes, anti-ulcer and so on. We will be proud of Nigeria selling the teas to other countries so that we will also be adding to the economy of the nation. We intend to export these teas to African countries, we are going beyond the shores of Nigeria.

How is the community around the Centre embracing the new concept?

We give free health talk every month to sensitise them about their health. We talk about the common diseases that people are interested in. We have talked about cancer, we have spoken to the youths about diseases from lifestyles. We have had three lectures so far and the community is happy. We choose a the semi-urban community because our studies showed that their awareness about health.

They have government health centres that people are not even exploring. So we decided to go and do health promotion. We want them to through us gain good health.

We just celebrated our Democracy. What do we want to achieve with Democracy? We want to be able to give to our people the dividends of democracy through health and natural medicine, which is medicine for the people, by the people, for the people, used by the people. There is scientific evidence to back the claim by doctors that herbal medicine causes organ damage or is dangerous to health. There is none anywhere in the world, in planet Earth that says it is only conventional medicines that have the sole solution to our health problems. Anything that does not have scientific evidence is not knowledge.