Some ailments require traditional methods, others hospital care

There are many illnesses affecting people these days. Some of them can be treated easily with traditional methods, while others require hospital care.

Going to the hospital when you're sick doesn't mean you're abandoning your culture or religious practices—it's just that some illnesses need diagnosis using machines and technology that may not be available in the places we believe in.

We often hear of people dying during church services or while consulting traditional healers—not necessarily because those healers were ineffective, but because the illness they were dealing with required hospital treatment.

Let's consider cancer: many people have died from it simply because they refused to go to the hospital. Cancer is an illness that can attack anyone at any time.

Hospitals now have better understanding and equipment to detect it early. The machines they use can show exactly where the cancer is in the body. Once it's detected, doctors can treat it immediately and potentially cure it.

The danger with treating cancer only through traditional means is that cancer has different stages, and traditional practitioners often can't detect those stages. They might only realize it's cancer when the person is already at death's door. That's why it's important to get screened and treated in hospitals.

Knowing the stage of the cancer helps save lives. Going to the hospital allows early detection, and doctors can use every method available to fight it and eliminate it from the body.

In a case reported in a local newspaper this week, a woman with enlarged breasts is advised to combine hospital treatment with traditional remedies—because you never know what might have caused the condition.

Perhaps traditional doctors might say it's a spiritual attack, but it could very well be cancer that's causing the abnormal growth.

Similarly, there are cases where a person appears to be mentally ill—not because they've lost their mind, but because they're being affected by ancestors or need to undergo a spiritual initiation (ukuthwasa).

With such mental illnesses, hospital tests might show nothing. That's when a visit to traditional healers can help identify the spiritual cause. If it's ancestral trouble, they can treat it accordingly. If the person needs initiation, they help with that, so the person isn't continuously troubled.

However, there are also illnesses that don't require traditional intervention, such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. For such conditions, people need to go to hospitals, explain their symptoms, and get medical help.

It's not helpful to stay at home saying, "My church doesn't allow hospital visits." They'll pray for you until you die. Some conditions need hospitals.