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The Evidence

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Claudia Hammond joins scientists and experts to explore science’s effect on our world

Claudia Hammond joins scientists and experts to explore the effect science has on the world around us

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The Evidence: Science and Society: Traditional Healers and HIV

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Traditional Healers and HIV

31/03/2018 GMT

Science and Society

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Can bringing together faith healers and medics help South Africa’s fight against HIV?

How bringing together two completely different medical and belief systems, clinical medicine and traditional healers, is helping South Africa’s fight against HIV.

Bound up in a history of mistrust, once outlawed and condemned as witchdoctors, reliant on faith, communications with ancestors and guided by spirits, traditional healers have an uneasy relationship with the conventional medical establishment. 

However South Africa’s efforts to control the spread of HIV means traditional healers are being encouraged to collaborate with a biomedical system based on treating patients using scientific evidence. 

We look at this unlikely success story – bringing together seemingly incompatible concepts of medicine and health care. 

Claudia Hammond speaks to traditional healers and biomedical researchers about the similarities and conflicts in their very different approaches and looks at the practical ways in which healers and medics are coming together to face the challenge of HIV.

Can visits to healers delay patients with diseases such as HIV from getting life-saving medication? Or could they be the key to ensuring every patient can get what they need?

Picture: Baba Ximba, KwaZuluNatal, Credit: Claudia Hammond

The Evidence: Science and Society

Claudia Hammond explores health in the context of society with experts from medicine, neuroscience, history and art.

How does Science push Civilisation forward? When does Science lead the process and when does it take civilisation down as many wrong paths as it takes us forward. Science has given us understanding of the cosmos, penicillin, the human genome. It has also given us pollution, atomic bombs and a technological divide which means that for many civilisation is split between those who have access to science and its discoveries and those who do not. 

The BBC World Service is joining forces with Wellcome Collection to create a new series of events and radio programmes that will explore scientific discoveries and approaches in health in the context of society and civilisation with international experts from the worlds of medicine, neuroscience, history and art.

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