Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Corresponding author. The purposes of this study were to develop a pain management model using traditional medicine TM vodou healing methods; to survey a sample of French dentists to rate components of conventional and proposed TM vodou-based pain management model; and to assess the possibility of conventional, allopathic providers to integrate TM or complementary and alternative medicine concepts.
From a set of 30 fact sheets collected from TM African healers vodou healers , main clinical concepts and terminology were extracted. Twenty vodou-based pain management concepts were collected from an interview with a TM vodou practitioner. From this information, a 7-step vodou-based pain management model was created. A sample of 40 French dentists from Nantes, France, whose practices focused on the clinical treatment of dental pain, was surveyed to assess the importance of both TM vodou and conventional biomedical components.
This study showed that traditional healers used conventional concepts and conventional practitioners could use traditional concepts. This suggests that conventional allopathic medical providers have the capacity to integrate biomedical concepts and other therapeutic and explanatory models. This information may be helpful to understand and improve risk management by anticipating and preventing potential reasons for failure in TM integration strategies and to enhance communication between patients, healers, and physicians to optimize TM or complementary and alternative medicine integration.
Key indexing terms: Traditional medicine; Complementary therapies; Integrative medicine; Pain management; Cultural characteristic; Communication; Dentists; Medicine, African traditional. The value given to traditional medicine TM is a function of public health and drug policies at a national level.
Its potential contribution to conventional allopathic medicine can be characterized by how it is defined, the motivation for its use, and country-specific integration strategies. Together, these terms refer to a broad set of health care practices that are not integrated into a country's primary biomedical health care system. For the purposes of this study, we merged the WHO definition 1 into an integrated approach. It also can be an evaluation, treatment, or counseling tool for health care providers to be used in the management of pathology or medical, social, cultural, ethnic, and economic problems in either a conventional or a traditional context.
