Diseases and Healthcare: The African Indigenous Religion Practitioners’ Perspective in Ghana

Diseases and Healthcare: The African Indigenous Religion Practitioners’ Perspective in Ghana

Konadu Adam , Dennis Tawiah and Dorcas Amedorme

Issue: Vol.4 No.6 20th June 2023 Article 5 pp.754-760
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2023465 | Published online 20th June, 2023
© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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ABSTRACT

Issues of diseases and healthcare are very crucial to human life and survival. Africans have always sought to find holistic and impeccable remedies to diseases and sicknesses that disturb human life and survival. Africans being incurably religious have sought to employ religious perspectives in their healing systems. Ghanaians have from time immemorial employed their indigenous or traditional worldview in their healing system or approach to diseases and sicknesses. This paper explores the African indigenous practitioners’ approach to diseases, their causes and solution. It also looks at the traditional healing systems in the face of the Western approach to diseases or healing systems. This work is a result of a discussion of scholarly works on African indigenous religious approaches to diseases and traditional healthcare vis-a-vis the orthodox healing systems. It is the ardent hope of the authors that readers appreciate African indigenous healing systems and how they can be combined with orthodox healing systems to ensure holistic healthcare in contemporary society.

Keywords: Healthcare, Diseases, Healing, Medicine, African Indigenous Religion, Traditional Religion

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ABOUT AUTHOR(S)

Konadu Adam holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He also holds a Diploma in Education from the University of Education, Winneba, all in Ghana. Moreover, he also holds a Master of Philosophy in Religious Studies from KNUST. His research interest has been in Religion and Society, the Comparative study of Religions and Interfaith Relations. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies at KNUST. He is a Tutor of Religious and Moral Education at St. Ambrose College of Education at Dormaa-Akwamu in the Bono Region of Ghana.

Dennis Tawiah also holds a Master of Philosophy in Religious Studies from KNUST. His research interest has been in Religion and Society, Religion and Moral Education and Biblical Studies. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies at KNUST. He is a Tutor of Religious and Moral Education at Seventh-Day Adventist College of Education at Agona in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.

Dorcas Amedorme holds a Master of Philosophy in Religion and Human Values from the University of Cape Coast (UCC) in Ghana. Her research interest has been in African Christianity. She is a Tutor of Religious and Moral Education at St. Ambrose College of Education at Dormaa-Akwamu in the Bono Region of Ghana.

TO CITE ARTICLE

Adam Konadu, Dennis Tawiah and Dorcas Amedorme. “Diseases and Healthcare: The African Indigenous Religion Practitioners’ Perspective in Ghana.” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 4, no.6 (2023): 754-760. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.2023465