“Healing Is Having Faith in Allah, the Healer, and the Medicine": An Exploratory Qualitative Study of Islamic-Based Healing Practices in Northern Ghana
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Faith-based healing practices are becoming widespread in Ghana. Charismatic churches, traditional healers, and Islamic faith healers provide healthcare services for multitudes nationwide. However, Islamic faith-based healers' medical perspectives and healing practices are less known. This descriptive exploratory qualitative study explores Islamic-based healing practices among the Dagomba and how Dagbon culture influences Islamic-based healing. Data were collected from six Islamic-based healers through participant observations and in-depth individual interviews using a semi-structured interview guide. Thematic analysis was employed, and results are reported narratively. The study discovered that Islamic-based healing is important in Dagbon, with healers providing healing services for diverse illnesses. Practitioners of Islamic-based healing among the Dagomba observe that having faith in Allah and trust in His healing powers is the foundation of health. Islamic principles of faith and the Dagomba worldviews of health and illness affect these healers’ medical knowledge and healing practices. The study found that rituals and sacrifices are significant healing practices with unique gendered perspectives. Spirituality is perceived as both an illness-causal factor and a healing tool. We invite further research to identify the prospects, constraints, and therapeutic possibilities Islamic medicine and healing hold for Ghana’s integrative medical system_._
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it