Orality and Medicine: The Efficacy of the Word in the Practice of Therapeutic Cures in Traditional African Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The practice of medicine or herbal cures in traditional societies particularly in Africa has often been viewed with mixed feelings and sometimes with outright disdain yet it has its own history of achievements particularly in the areas of bone setting and therapeutic cures or exorcism. This notwithstanding, today in Nigeria however, one notices that modern technological innovations and education have greatly impacted on traditional medical practice and medicine men are encouraged to improve upon their practices, particularly their environments. The efficacy of traditional herbal cures in most of our societies encouraged this writer to examine some of the methods employed by the medicine men. The result of this was the interesting discovery that traditional medicine men place high priority on the power of the word as evidenced in their incantations, invocations and chants. The “word” in the healing process is seen as an appeal to a supernatural being who is summoned to the aid of the patient. That supernatural force could be the supreme God or the traditional deities believed to be in control of human existence. In the end, the writer discovered that the traditional medicine men possessed the best stock of poetical expressions and dramatic dialogue which they employ to establish a relationship or rapport between man and nature or the supernatural in the process of healing. Key words: Traditional African Medicine; Nigeria; Traditional medical practice; Herbal cures
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".