COVID-19 AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

Novel Conceptual Framework for COVID-19 Responses

BY BIKO AGOZINO

 

As in the Great Plague of 1665-1666, the cure for COVID-19 may not be a magic bullet in the form of a vaccine, herbs or pills because no vaccine is 100% effective and there may be chances of breakthrough infections and the need for booster shots with no end in sight as the virus mutates. 

The search for effective interventions must look beyond vaccines and also consider original methods in the form of indigenous knowledge systems such as fasting that the government declared nationally in England with the belief that the plague was punishment for sin. Science has since proven that fasting is an effective response to viral infections. A national or global day of fasting will cost nothing and is accessible to all. It may just be the simple but effective novel conceptual framework that would prepare the world to prevent similar pandemics in the future at no additional cost. 

Our approaches respond to the challenges facing older people as a result of the pandemic by presenting disruptive ways of thinking about the problems that have evaded solutions, proposing new and paradigm-shifting scientific hypotheses that are testable by all in ways that are undervalued by the scientific community.

 

I read the co-authored paper on the role of Chinese Medicine in the fight against the Corona Virus. I am very impressed by the different institutional affiliations of the authors to show how the Peoples Republic of China takes seriously scientific approaches to indigenous knowledge systems in health. However, like all traditional medicine systems and exactly like pharmacological medicine, treatment tends to suffer from ingestion and injection biases. What if the Chinese experimented with a national day of fasting to help them halt the spread of the disease dramatically? There is evidence that intermittent fasting is widely practiced in TCM. The application of indigenous knowledge systems may be part of the reasons why Africa has defied the predictions of most experts by surviving better than many richer economies so far.

 

The indigenous knowledge system hypothesis in my linked paper here could help the world to prevent and treat the epidemic very quickly. My African hypothesis offers the original and innovative abstention intervention through a 24 hours water only fasting to weaken the virus and strengthen the immune system and produce dramatic recovery.

 

A 90-year old great grandmother, Geneva Wood, in the state of Washington reported that when she was sick with COVID-19, she could not eat for three days, "I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to do anything,” Wood said. One of the major symptoms of Covid is loss of appetite, a bio-feedback asking us to undergo intermittent fasting with water only.

 

That is probably why she survived while her co-nursing home residents perished by the dozens. The symptoms in many patients include loss of taste and appetite, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, headache, fever, and dry cough - all of which suggest that periodic fasting can help at no cost and even at negative cost of savings on food.

 

I am happy to provide other related hypotheses like desistance from blowing the nose and instead sniffing it in and spitting out to reduce hand contamination and the bruising of the nose that could attract more infections. 

The benefit of ventilating the homes and hospitals cannot be overemphasized because the air inside tends to be two times more polluted than the air outside. 

The controlled experimental design is proposed by having 100 patients with COVID-19 symptoms try the 24 hours fasting with water while another control group continues with conventional treatment to be compared after one week. If X, then Y and if the differences are significant, the intervention will be extended to all patients worldwide and even to healthy populations to promote herd immunity the way indigenous communities must have done to survive past pandemics. 

Of course, you do not need a controlled experiment to tell you that you should open your windows and let fresh air into your buildings daily, not to pick your nose, and to go off food once in a while and drink lots of water. Care Homes, schools and offices with windows that cannot be opened should experiment with all doors pegged open to allow more fresh air from outside and to prevent the need for hundreds of unwashed hands to share the same door knobs daily. Open Doors Policies may help! When you try some or all of the above non-medical recommendations, be observant and record how you feel in a wellness diary. Then compare with before.

 

Healing The President

Healing Help for President Yar’Adua




By Biko Agozino


My book, ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine, has been recognized by the National Natural Medicine Development Agency for many months as the ‘Book of the Month’ in their digital library. I am pleased to say that the book has the solution to the health of President Yar’Adua. The solution would cost him absolutely nothing and also save our country from the contempt of the international com munity. Poor Nigerians will also benefit from my discoveries because my effective prescriptions cost absolutely nothing because they are based on drug-free and herb-free methods of healing!


They said that the man complained of chest pain and doctors diagnosed it as pericarditis with symptoms of cough and catarrh. None of our medical scientists in Nigeria and abroad is able to prescribe anything for the poor comrade and so we are enduring the shame of having our number one citizen being detained by common medical doctors who are dictating when he would be allowed to come back as our Servant Leader. What a shame!


We are not told details of what the illness is and so we can only speculate. It is important that we know exactly what the president is suffering from to avoid unnecessary panic whenever he is hospitalized. Nigerians have demonstrated their melodramatic Nollywood traits by organizing prayer carnivals or jockeying for his office rather offer a scientific response to what is a scientific problem in the age of the knowledge economy.


If it is common catarrh and chest pain, then we should be told so because there is nothing secret about the common cold. Millions of Nigerians catch it every year without having to rush to hospital. Many would just buy antibiotics (unnecessarily) from chemists and treat themselves but many more will just endure it and let it pass. What is shameful is that our number one citizen would go abroad for treatment when there could be effective remedies in the country. To put it bluntly, the president should save us the embarrassment of going abroad to be treated for the common cold because there is no known cure for the infection.


For the chest pain, the president should immediately check his posture. I read in one of the papers that he is sitting and watching football as he recovers in Saudi Arabia. Bad situation, if you ask me! Sitting on a couch or being propped up in bed to watch hours of television is exactly the kind of posture that would trigger chest pain. Snap out of it and do some gentle stretching for at least 30 minutes daily. As a powerful man, I am almost certain that the kind of couch he sits on at home and in the office is very soft. Wrong type if you have to sit there for hours and hours on end. Always sit with your back resting on a firm backrest and always sleep on your back for quick recovery from the chest pain without any medication!


If it was allergy to hay fever, the president should note that he may be catching it from his air conditioners. As a big man, he probably sleeps in an air-conditioned bedroom, drives everywhere in air-conditioned vehicles, works in air-conditioned offices and rarely gets to breathe fresh air. This could lead to something called air-conditioner fever which is caused by pores that the cold air blows into the enclosed environment. The air indoors is twice as polluted as the air outside. So for prevention, the president must make sure that he opens the windows in his bedroom, his office and his vehicles at least once a day. He should use fans more and air-conditioners less.


If the allergy is about to attack him by blocking his nose, he must not blow his nose. He should sniff it in and spit out to prevent the imminent attack from being full blown. If the cold is a full blown attack, all the president needed was to go off food, get plenty of bed rest, lots of fresh air, lots of fresh fruits and lots of water and he would be better within twenty-four hours. My 2006 book, ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine ISBN: 978-1-4116-6915- 4 (www.lulu.com) has a chapter on how to prevent the common cold and the president may benefit from reading the book for this and other ailments that could be treated or prevented without any medication.


It is an easy to read book about bio-feedbacks and how to listen to the body in order to learn how to prevent or how to heal the body without relying on drugs or herbs for the cases of ill health covered. In it I reveal to any person who suffers from many chronic illnesses, the secrets of how to listen to the body and to understand what the body is saying and how to respond to the feedback from the body in order to stay more healthy.

ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine is good news to the poor people of the world who lack adequate access to modern medical technologies because the methods revealed in the book are not only drug-free, they are also free of charge because you do not need to buy anything other than the book to help you follow the instructions and take better control of your health.


ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine is a humorous step-by-step guide to help individuals rediscover the ancient wisdom that must have been with us from the beginning of time when there were no doctors or drugs and yet people lived for centuries because they could tap into knowledge systems that the modern world may have lost as we chase after pills and disregard anything that could not be sold as a commodity.


I wrote ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine to help my family, friends and colleagues to learn from my personal discoveries but they soon started urging me to publish it and share it with the world generally. My aim is to get the book to readers as quickly as possible without making the book too expensive, hence I used on-demand printing to publish it.


I propose to share the discoveries in the book with the Nigerian public as part of the struggle for better health for all but especially for the poor who do not have the kind of money that made it possible for our Comrade President to travel abroad for such a small thing. If the government would approve a research grant for the clinical trials, I would design an experiment in which thousands try my proven ADAM principles while a control group tries the conventional methods and we will compare to see which is more effective.


The newly founded national institute for alternative medicine is a step in the right direction and I would like to collaborate with the institute in the clinical trials if funded. Apart from the flu and the common cold, my book also has discoveries on how to prevent migraine without drugs, how to heal backache without drugs or surgery, how to cure bellyache without drugs, and many more tips that could benefit both the rich and the poor.


It is sad to read that the president keeps being rushed abroad where the authoritarian doctors keep holding him hostage in order to claim a bigger payment in defiance of our national interest to have our Servant Leader back! When will the human rights lawyers bring a law suit against the foreign hospitals for kidnapping our Comrade President? I wish the president quick recovery but I also hope that his handlers are alert to issues of national interest in how his health is being handled. I hope that the issues will be carefully analyzed to identify lessons for the country and for the president personally.


Dr Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. agozino@vt.edu