Health Care Practices Construct of Purnell's Model in African Zulu Tribe

Healthcare Practices and Healthcare Practitioners
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Healthcare Practices and Healthcare Practitioners: Zulu Nation
Sensitivity to the cultural beliefs of the Zulu tribe is indispensable for the western medical intervention to succeed. In this paper, the Health Care Practices construct of Purnell's model is comprehensively discussed as it relates to the African Zulu Tribe. Several constructs are discussed. (i) Focus on health care: as regards healthcare, folk healers in the Zulu culture provide their patients with multi-medications produced from minerals, animals, as well as plants - impregnated with spiritual significance. These are drugs for everything ranging from mental and physical ailments, spiritual difficulties and social disharmony to potions for luck, love and protection (Truter, 2012). Traditional healers are categorized into 2 groups: inyanga is the herbalist, while sangoma is the diviner. However, due to cross-cultural mixing, apartheid, urbanization, as well as colonialism, the distinction between inyanga and sangoma has become blurred and folk healers have a tendency to practice both arts. In providing health care, these traditional Zulu witchdoctors could alternate between their roles through diagnosing common diseases, selling and providing medications for medical complaints, and divining the cause and giving solutions to socially or spiritually centered complaints (Irving et al., 2011).(ii) Traditional practices: traditional healing practices is widespread in the Zulu Nation and the sick are first taken to traditional healers who are basically medicine men, also known as witchdoctors. Rather than being treated as an isolated individual as in the case of biomedicine, patients in the Zulu culture are treated as an integral element of both a family and a community on the whole.
(iii) Magico-religious beliefs: the Zulus' world is inseparable from the spirit world. Ancestral worship is a Zulu cultural belief and practice that is rooted into the very fabric of the existence of the worshippers. As such, whenever a Zulu patient becomes very sick, the final authority on her illness's prognosis and diagnosis are her ancestral spirits. The dead ancestors, ironically, dictate the well-being of those who are alive (Chidester, 2012). The spiritual realm in the Zulu culture causes the natural to be or not to be. (iv) Responsibility for health: there is personal responsibility for health in the Zulu culture whereby the Zulu people are often recommended by their traditional healers to follow healthy lifestyles such as exercising and not smoking, to maintain personal hygiene and heed the advice of the medicine men. (v) Transplantation: transplantation is by and large the optimal treatment for organ failure. Cultural and religious beliefs are the main reasons for a refusal to donate body organ in Zulu Nation. In essence, donation of organ is not encouraged within the Zulu religion. The Zulus believe that donating body organ means playing God, and according to them, nobody has to inter...