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Psychiatry, traditional healers, and the vimbusa, in northern Malawi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Gianetta Rands
Gianetta Rands*
Affiliation:
Royal Free Hospital Registrar Rotation, London
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Last year I was fortunate enough to visit two GP friends running a district hospital in northern Malawi. As I had just taken Part 1 of the Membership Examination, they were intrigued to know my professional view of a condition called ‘the vimbusa’. In their experience, the vimbusa was a common complaint with a wide variety of presentations, none of which corresponded with disease entities they had learnt during their training. After a fascinating two weeks I was unable to categorise the vimbusa according to ICD-9, but the following essay summarises my attempts to understand this condition.

Type
Articles
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 13 , Issue 11 , November 1989 , pp. 622 - 625
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1989

References

Ben-Tovim, D. I. (1987) Development Psychiatry; Mental Health and Primary Health Care in Botswana. London: Tavistock Publications.Google Scholar
Leff, J. P. (1981) Psychiatry around the Globe. New York and Basel: Marcel Dekker.Google Scholar
Ogunlesi, A. O. & Adelekan, M. L. (1988) Nigerian primary health care workers: a pilot survey on attitude to mental health. Psychiatric Bulletin, 12, 441–443.Google Scholar
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