Attitudes of biomedicine and alternative medicine practitioners towards collaboration in patient care: Tutume Sub-district, Botswana

Background: The government of Botswana through the National Health Policy encourages collaboration between the biomedicine and alternative medicine practitioners. The policy states that the Government would promote and foster mutual respect between the two sides, facilitate and maintain dialogue in the form of seminars and workshops and encourage and support research into traditional medicine. The main objective was to see contact between the two sides and discussions on the collaboration process. There has not been any documentation of how the collaboration has unfolded thus far and this was the motivation for conducting this study.

We examined the attitudes of the BM and AM practitioners towards collaboration and determined approaches to, and the level of collaboration between the two sides. We conducted a survey among 60 biomedical and 40 alternative medicine practitioners in one sub- district in Botswana. We obtained information on the demographics of the study population, types of AM practices, attitudes and opinions on collaboration, approaches to and level of collaboration

We found that BM have negative feelings towards AM practices and collaboration, they do not trust AM with patients, citing toxicities, morbidities and mortalities that is experienced in the course of practice. Collaboration is seen as a way of encouraging patient referral from AM and a means of teaching them safer practices On the other hand all AM were in favour of collaboration, they view BM as colleagues, and are willing to share knowledge with them.