A lady from Sabah...

A young lady from Sabah, a close friend of our daughter visit us just a few days during the fasting month. She spend two nights at our home. During the two days whenever she is at our home and when the opportunity arise I sat to chat with her on various subjects that of interest to us. She is working with an NGO that is involved in some social engineering projects, that take her around the globe. Actually the reason she is here in Kuala Lumpur this few days is because she in on a transit to catch a flight to her another destination, Bangladesh.

It is fasting month and she been a Catholic did not fast and when it is the time to break fast, we invited her to join in at the dinner table. At time continue to chat on subjects that came to our mind. As usual with me at time before the breaking of the fast, I would chat with her on various subjects. Mostly on social engineering that I did in my youth. She is actually doing what I did before, transferring knowledge to the needy in the rural areas, both in her home state of Sabah and overseas as well.

Just before a meal the other day the subject went from the wonder of Sarawak and Sabah Beat Artifact that her people did to the subject of traditional medicine, the wonder of our past knowledge of healing the sick using the traditional means. In today's treatment of the sick, most patients are treated for their illness but at time it did not includes healing, whereas in traditional medicine the focus is in the healing with includes treatment as well. It is this differences that make traditional medicine or alternative medicine unique by itself. It heals the sick.

This subject which sometime people say is related to the supernatural actually it is not so. To me it is a science of a sorts. It has to do with the way our medicine man do their job in healing the sick. In actual fact it is because of the service of those medicine man [ in our culture it is call Dukun, Pawang, and the like ] who had provided all the means and ways of healing the sick before the coming of modern medicine, that our society had survived to this days. Had it not been for the service of those medicine man, a respected figure in any traditional society, I do not believe our species would have survived.

Modern medicine is actually a recent developments in the history of man, so had it not been for the great works of our traditional medicine man, sickness would have finished off our species, especially here in Asia. These traditional medicine man had been part of the Asian society for thousand of years and surely they had great knowledge and wisdom. Working hand in hand with modern medicine would surely be a great advantage to mankind.

In my chat with this young lady, we seem to agree on many aspects of the role of the Tradition and the Wisdom of the old in our society.