By Olakunle Olafioye
Few weeks ago when Mrs Omoshalewa Idowu felt a bit under the weather, she had no fuss ‘diagnosing’ her ailment as malaria fever. 
After all she knows her genotype to be AA and she had often heard that people with AA genotype mostly suffer from malaria. Soon she headed for a chemist shop and procured three doses of cocktails of anti-malaria drugs. Upon the completion of the drugs, she claimed that she felt relieved and everything seemed to have gone fine until she experienced a pang of relapse some days later.
This time around she settled for local herbs prepared from leaves, bark and roots of plants sourced from her community. Days of respite followed after taking the concoction for few days. Again, everything seemed to go on well until she suddenly passed out and was rushed to a nearby hospital.
Laboratory tests would later reveal that Mrs Idowu had been suffering from an ailment entirely different from what she had been treating.
A medical practitioner, Dr Smith Adikpe said that Mrs Idowu’s case is not uncommon to practitioners in the field of medicine in Nigeria.
He added that more and more sick Nigerians have now made visits to hospitals for medical attention their last resorts, a development he described as a “very dangerous trend”.
“We have three to four patients who reported almost when it was becoming too late here in our facility now,” he added.
Most disturbing among these cases, as Dr Adikpe revealed, is a case of an unnamed child whom he claimed was kept in a church for days until a good Samaritan who saw the precarious state of the child insisted the innocent child must be taken to the hospital.
The six-year-old was said to have been ill for close to a month, but the parents decided to keep him at home and gave him all manners of drugs, including herbal concoctions and drugs procured from local chemist shops.
But when his condition failed to improve, his parents, it was gathered sought the help of a nurse in the neighborhood.
The nurse also treated the child for few days but later advised the boy be taken to a standard hospital for comprehensive medical attention.
The parents, rather than head for the hospital as advised by the nurse, decided to take him to a church and resorted to prayers.
Things would later come to a head on Monday, October 10. The boy was said to have convulsed twice and after he was revived the second time, one of the visitors to the church who was around advised the boy be taken to a hospital for an urgent medical attention and promised to foot the bill.
“If they had wasted more time before bringing the boy to the hospital, there was no certainty that the boy would have survived,” Dr Adikpe revealed.
Until penultimate Tuesday, when Mrs Cecilia Shomefun, proprietress of Damevic Nursery and Primary School, Ota, Ogun State, sent a panic call through to the parents of one of the pupils of the school, the boy’s parents had failed to heed the school’s advice concerning their son’s deteriorating health.
The pupil, an Upper Basic pupil was said to have been sick for over two weeks. The boy, an active and lively pupil of the school, according to the Mrs Shomefun, had suddenly turned a recluse and pale.
“It was the class teacher who called my attention to the sudden changes noticed about him and I called the mother who claimed she was aware of the boy’s condition and she confirmed he had been feeling unwell for some days. I suggested to her to take him to the hospital,” she recalled.
The sick boy was absent for a few days and returned to the school.
“When he returned and I asked him how he was feeling, I noticed fresh incisions around his two wrists and that gave me the idea that his parents might have decided to explore other option instead of taking him for thorough medical attention as I advised. The boy also confirmed that he was not taken to any hospital. After a day or two, the boy began to complain of serious headache while his body temperature became unbearably too high. It was at that point that I decided to make a frantic call to his mother who raced down to the school in no time. I told her to take the boy home and never to allow him come back to school until he has been properly treated,” Mrs Shomefun said.
A common denominator among the reasons given for delaying seeking medical attention in all these cases was the soaring costs of getting healthcare service in Nigeria.
Dr Adikpe confirmed that access to quality medical care is becoming more expensive especially for the Nigerian masses, adding that government-owned hospitals are equally being priced out of the reach of the masses.
“In the past there used to be concession for children below age five and the elderly at government-owned hospitals but the current realities in the country has made subsidized or free health services unsustainable. That is why most people with one health challenge or the other are reluctant to go to hospitals until their conditions degenerate to unendurable extent.
“Unfortunately, delaying seeking medical attention, most times, often prove costlier and sometimes fatal. It is not advisable to make visit to hospital a last resort when one is sick,” he admonished.
Findings by Sunday Sun correspondent at Orile-Agege General Hospital, Lagos and Onipanu General Hospital, Ota, Ogun State confirmed that a good number of people who visit the hospital for consultations do not honour their next appointments just as findings also show that only a fraction of patients with doctors prescriptions patronize pharmacies in both hospitals.
These, sources at both hospitals, conceded might be an indication that many people still resort to weighing their options after visiting the hospital.
Dr. Adikpe however insisted that there is still no better alternative to seeking and getting qualitative medical care when one is sick. Corroborating his submission, Ms. Mabel Etuk, a pharmacist said that although traditional medicine holds a huge prospect, she however maintained that there are fundamental challenges which must be addressed before native and herbal medicine could be generally considered as dependable alternative to orthodox medicine. “The fundamental challenge is that the practitioners of native and herbal medicines refuse to subject their practice and products to scientific evaluation and validation which makes it a limiting factor to expand the frontiers for the growth and development of traditional medicine practice. This is a major challenge and as long as this persists, our confidence in native and herbal medicines will remain what it is,” she said.