Traditional healing practice

A parallel system of care

Across Nigeria, traditional medicine operates alongside, and often ahead of, formal biomedical healthcare, particularly in rural areas where hospitals and clinics are distant, expensive or thinly staffed. Estimates repeated by health researchers and the Federal Ministry of Health over the years have suggested that a large share of the Nigerian population consults a traditional practitioner at some point for a given illness, whether as a first resort, a supplement to hospital treatment, or a last resort after biomedical options have been exhausted. The practice is not a single tradition: it spans herbal medicine, bone setting, traditional birth attendance, and spiritual or divinatory diagnosis, each with its own specialists and its own claims to competence.

Herbal medicine

The herbalist draws on an extensive, largely orally transmitted body of knowledge about the medicinal properties of local plants, barks, roots and leaves, prepared as decoctions, powders, pastes or infusions for conditions ranging from malaria and stomach complaints to skin conditions and difficult labour. Many of these preparations are handed down within families or through informal apprenticeship, and knowledge of the more specialised or powerful preparations is often held closely by senior practitioners rather than shared openly, a point of professional caution as much as secrecy. Some plants used in Nigerian herbal medicine, such as Cryptolepis sanguinolenta for fever and various Artemisia and Azadirachta (neem) preparations, have drawn sustained scientific interest for their measurable pharmacological activity.

Bone setting and birth attendance

Traditional bone setters treat fractures and dislocations through manipulation, splinting with local materials, and herbal dressings, and remain a common first call for injuries in many communities, valued for speed of access and lower cost than a hospital, and by reputation for effective results with straightforward fractures. Outcomes are considerably more variable for complex or compound fractures, where delay in reaching proper orthopaedic care can lead to malunion, chronic disability or, in severe untreated infections, amputation — a documented and serious risk that health authorities have long tried to address through outreach and referral partnerships rather than confrontation. Traditional birth attendants (TBAs) similarly remain the main source of delivery care in many rural areas lacking accessible maternity facilities, providing genuine value in normal deliveries, while carrying real risk in complications such as obstructed labour or haemorrhage that require surgical or emergency intervention unavailable to a TBA.

The dibịa and babaláwo as diagnostician

Among the Igbo, the dibịa, and among the Yorùbá, the babaláwo, occupy a role that goes beyond dispensing remedies. Both are consulted to establish why an illness or misfortune has occurred at all — whether a spiritual, ancestral or relational cause underlies a physical symptom — before any specific treatment or ritual offering is prescribed. This diagnostic function sits within a wider cosmology in which illness is not always treated as a purely biological event, and it is not, in itself, incompatible with also seeking hospital treatment; many families pursue both routes for the same illness, treating them as addressing different dimensions of the same problem rather than as rival explanations that must be chosen between.

Regulation

Nigeria has taken steps to bring traditional practice into a formal regulatory structure, principally through the Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency and state-level Traditional Medicine Boards, along with a long-mooted Traditional Medicine Council intended to register practitioners, set standards of practice, and provide a framework for integrating traditional and orthodox medicine. In practice, regulation remains partial and inconsistently enforced: many practitioners work without formal registration, product standardisation for herbal preparations is limited, and there is no consistent national system for verifying practitioner competence, dosage safety or quality control of remedies sold in open markets.

The real risks

The risks of unregulated practice are documented rather than hypothetical: herbal preparations of unknown concentration and purity have been linked to liver and kidney toxicity, interactions with prescribed medication are rarely anticipated by either herbalist or patient, and delay in seeking hospital care for conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer, or obstetric emergencies has led to preventable deaths where traditional treatment was pursued exclusively for too long. These risks sit alongside genuine benefits — accessibility, cultural trust, lower cost and, in well-attested cases, real therapeutic effect — and responsible discussion of traditional medicine in Nigeria generally holds both facts at once rather than dismissing the practice outright or endorsing it uncritically.

Research interest

Nigerian and international researchers, including at institutions such as the Nigerian Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, continue to screen indigenous plants used in traditional medicine for active pharmaceutical compounds, part of a broader African and global effort to validate, standardise or, where appropriate, discount specific traditional remedies through conventional clinical evidence. This research has occasionally confirmed real pharmacological activity in long-used remedies, while in other cases finding no measurable effect beyond placebo, underscoring that individual remedies, like individual practitioners, vary widely in reliability and cannot be judged as a single undifferentiated category.