Defining minimum standards of practice for incorporating African traditional medicine into HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and support: a regional initiative in eastern and southern Africa.

In many resource-poor settings of Africa, a majority of people living with HIV/AIDS depend on and choose traditional healers for psychosocial counseling and health care. If the current pan-African prevention and care efforts spurred by the HIV pandemic do not actively engage African Traditional Medicine, they will effectively miss 80%, the vast majority of the African people who, according to the World Health Organization, rely on traditional medicine for their primary health care needs. In 2001, the Ugandan nongovernmental organization, Traditional and Modern Health Practitioners Together Against AIDS and Other Diseases, in Kampala, identified the need for a concerted, systematic, and sustained effort at both local and regional levels to support and validate African Traditional Medicine on several fronts.