Traditional Health,Nutrition, Safety, Honduran Indians and Wikipedia

Wikipedia and Its Use as a Tool to Spread Medical Knowledge  and Issues Related to Traditional Peoples in Western Medicine dominated Health systems, Across Language and Cultural and Boundaries of Distance

 

By Wendy Griffin, former anthropology profesor UPN, and writer HondurasWeekly.com

 

Biomedical medicine and Traditional medicinal practices and beliefs exist in every country of the world,including the US and Canada. Articles related to both are in Wikipedia, sometimes in multiple versions in different languages. Wikipedia is interested in recruiting more doctors and medical students, more minorities, more translators, more Medical anthropologists and Native activists and more people in general to look at, to improve, to write or to translate articles or to provide illustrations or photos or sound and video recordings for them, related to health, nutrition, or other topics. The digital recordings or photos or illustrations are stored on a separate Wikimedia Foundation project called Wikimedia Commons. Good nutrition, safe food, safe water, protection of indigenous intellectual property rights, and rights on indigenous peoples to access medicinal plants and other elements needed for native health are also issues which motivate many indigenous people regarding health.  How to treat adequately youth with troubled spirits, which sometimes leads them to unproductive behavior like drugs or alcohol or suicide, is another issue in Native American health.

Why Wikipedia needs more people to help edit or Translate medical related Wikipedia Articles:.

“Wikipedia is difficult partly because writing high quality content is difficult and partly because of  culture. There are far fewer people editing than many people realize. In most languages there is no one consistently editing medical content. In English there are maybe a couple of dozen. This is in sharp contrast to how often Wikipedia's medical content is read. All languages got about 6 billion pageviews for health care content last year (2 billion of which were in English). So the small number of editors is in sharp contrast to the huge number of readers,” reports Doc James, a Wikipedian in Canada very active in WikiProject Med Foundation.

 

Why Doctors and Medical School Professors got  Involved with improving or translating Wikipedia medical articles related to illnesses as defined by Western health criteria?

The Wikipedia Medical Project is one of the most active thematic organization within Wikipedia, the most active being military history. It exists as a separate legally organized non-profit organization, WikiProject Med Foundation, a more formal entity than WikiProject Medicine. It  is incorporated not so much to raise money but to be a real life entity with which like minded organizations can form partnership with to improve access to health care information. reported Doctor James Heilman, an active member,  although since it is a legal non-profit, it is eligible for donations.

Wikipedia has an active group of doctors, medical students and other people interested in medicine contributing to medical articles, such as about diseases, medicines, etc. because now the first thing patients do when they hear “you need to take this drug” or “you have this disease” is look it up on the Internet. The first articles that come up on Google are those from Wikipedia, by agreement between Google and Wikipedia. Doctors often found their patients were saying things like, “I read on the Internet, that…..”, and asked questions or were or were not compliant with treatment based on what they found on the Internet, so some doctors felt it was important to get involved to improve the articles.

 Some of the most searched for topics on the Internet include most major mental illnesses, like depression, manic depression (bipolar disorder), schizophrenia, and anxiety. Since studies show that it often takes 10 years to identify Manic Depression, especially in women, or borderline personality, often patients who find information in the library or on the Internet about their condition can describe it better to doctors and convince the doctors of the diagnosis, if the patients are researching the illness and the medication on the Internet. 

US urban libraries like in Portland or in Pittsburgh are notorious for the significant number of homeless people in them, and being able to use the Internet for free and accessing websites and books for more information, may give them better insight into what is the matter with them and what might make them well. In Pittsburgh, the majority of the long term homeless had either mental health or physical health issues that were not yet under control, which directly contributed to their homelessness.  See an example in the article “A Personal Story of Homelessness and Unresolved Physical and Mental Health Issues-The Story of a Female Vet”.

In the Third World, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds libraries with Internet connections through their Global Libraries initiative , such as the Reicken Foundation which operates in Honduras and Guatemala and other libraries in Africa, partly so that people can access information about health on the Internet.

Why Translators are Involved with Wikipedia and more are Needed.

But  there  also needs to be information about health on the Internet in a language they speak for them to access, such as through Wikipedia. For doctors or others who know some English, but not high level English typical of most medical textbooks, simplified English versions of many health articles are available. Wikipedia’s Medical Translation Project is  now working on 60 languages up from 30 a year ago. They  now have an additional 22 simplified articles ( up from 4 last year). More than a dozen cellphone companies around the world have agreed to wave data charges for 750 million people so that they can access Wikipedia for free through cellphones that let you read text (not a common type of cellphone in Central America, but more and more used in East Africa.) This eliminates the problem that in many places there are no up-to-date books or journals to consult. There are also Wikipedia readers which let Wikipedia be downloaded and read in areas withouth Internet connections. Both these readers and the cellphone Access can be used in areas without constant sources of electricity, for example where solar panals recharge cellphones or where deisel generators provide a few hours of electricity a day or a week.  

Why some Universities Got Involved with Using Wikipedia Medical Writing for Classwork and got involved Wikipedia’s Education Outreach Project?

One English as a Foreign language teacher Leigh Thelmadatter in Mexico used translating Wikipedia Medical articles in English into Spanish as a way to encourage the future doctors who were studying Technical Medical English to improve their English reading, their Spanish writing and computer skills, plus instead of just having their work be classwork, it is read by thousands of sick people or their doctors and family members a month.  That is much higher motivation to read and write carefully.   

An active Wikipedian in Namibia teaches Technology at a Technical Institute there and finds that getting students involved with Wikipedia helps them think about how to combine New Technology and what they know about Namibia, which most of the world knows nothing about. The Maya K’iche Indian Organization of Guatemala now has as one of its mottos, “TIC’s (Information and Communication Technologies) in service of the rescue of Mayan culture.”

Many universities in the Third World have as a mission to help the lives of people not fortunate enough to be able to reach the level of a university education and providing information for other levels of society and education.  Third World Universities also often have as part of their work letting other countries know about that country and its history and cultures for many reasons. Whole international conferences are being devoted to the topics of sharing information across borders and the role of the Internet in that, and Wikipedia as a free resource, and a resource easier to enter data into than a traditional website, and as a highly used resource with many articles attracting thousands of readers a month, is an attractive alternative for Third World universities. Canada and the US have their own Wikipedia Education programs, but so do Argentina and some other countries which work on Wikipedia in languages other than English.

From: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Newsletter/March_2014/Education_Cooperative_Kickoff_Meeting_in_Prague

Education Portal/Newsletter/March 2014/Education Cooperative Kickoff Meeting in Prague

From Outreach Wiki< Education Portal‎ | Newsletter‎ | March 2014

Examples of Anthropologists, Educators, and Native and Afro-Latin American Human Rights Activists Getting Involved with Sharing Information about non-Western health traditions and Issues involved with interaction of Western Medicine and Science dominated institutions with Traditional People’s Health, Culture, Religion and Human Rights and also  Helping to Inform Health Care to Minorities and Immigrants in the US and Canada and the Education of Minority or Traditional Peoples.

Information on the Internet in general, and in Wikipedia in particular because it is free, anyone can edit, and is easier than learning to program websites and has a policy of being multilingual, can go both ways, both from US medical practioners who want to share Western style medicine with those in the Third World, and those who work with Third World people and Native Americans in the US and Canada in traditional medicine who want to educate US and other developing world doctors about how their foreign born patients might be identifying their health problems. There are several interdisciplinary fields that deal with this type of information like Medical Anthropology and Ethnobotany. Public Health programs which are dealing with issues Racial Disparities in Medical Outcomes or in use of formal Medical systems often rely on this kind of Applied Anthropology information.  Nutrition and the Anthropology of food, and the crossover between Native Religions, traditional health practioners and their training and use, and how to obtain good health are other examples in interdisciplinary crossover which Wikipedia has a general encyclopedia often includes good examples of, with links to internationally produced documents like the UN’s Study on the State of Midwifery or on the State of Indigenous Peoples.

For example, at the recent 2014 Society for Applied Anthropology conference, the issue of criminalization of Hispanics is affecting the degree and when they access formal Medical systems in the US, so doctors are more likely to see people who have tried traditional medicine first and only when that failed, as a dire emergency, they may see these patients, and knowing what was the first treatment or diagnosis by folk medicine may be important. Related to the $30 million grant of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the University of Washington for Global Health, three professors in the Anthropology Department at the University of Washington are identified as working in Global Health. 

 As more and more people from traditional societies end up in the US, European, and Canadian healthcare system, they are working with people who have ideas about illness, prevention, treatment, that are very different than those taught in US Medical Schools. If Hispanic mothers present in US clinics saying their children seem to have “paletillas”, “pujo/puho”, “empacho”, “haito”, “their soft spot has sunken” (hundida de la mollera), “aire” “ojo”,  it would be useful for the US doctors or their translators to know what are the symptoms that these illnesses have and what makes the mothers think their children might have these diseases.  This would give a clue as what the person sees as the major complaints of the child.

 Articles can also identify what European identified diseases are often sometimes confused with a local disease. For example, in Honduras people found that Garifunas, a traditional Afro-Indigenous people, who had a type pneunomia which is often common earlier indicator of AIDS, often ended up seeing traditional massage therapists (sobadoras)  or shaman (buyeis or curanderos) first, because they thought the illness might be “paletillas” (the sinking of the bone at the bottom of the ribcage, which has similar symptoms, including paletillas can cause death if not treated. See separate articles on Garifunas and Traditional medicine for examples.) Even many city trained nurses in Honduras said they were unaware of what “paletillas” was or how traditional healers identified it. The Garifunas of whom about 100 live in the Seattle area and probably over 100,000 live in the US such as in New York,  Los Angeles, and Miami, are leaders internationally on the issue of traditional health practioner-formal medical systems interactions as a Human Rights issue. The First World Summit of Afro-Descent people hosted by the Garifunas in La Ceiba, Honduras in 2011, and which wrote a declaration about Development with Identity, which is a guideline for the current UN Decade of Afro-Descent People,  was principally funded by the Pan-American Health Organization, so the special health issues of Afro-descent people is on the agenda of International health organizations, while ILO Convention 169 which has been ratified in 20 countries, requires an even higher level of attention in regards to indigenous populations

In the US, the Coordinated Care Network in Pittsburgh found that pastors in churches or even bartenders and hairdressers often are consulted about mental health issues which Western medicine identifies as illnesses like depression, anxiety, manic depression or about side effects of medications taken for these and where to get help. Having good quality information for lay people written at a level of language they can understand and easily accessible is relevant even in the US.

People who treat mental health issues in Hispanics in the US usually find that their patients see their problem in terms of  Spanish terms like “nervios” and “susto”, and it is probably useful to know what are the symptoms of nervios, how are nervios or susto traditionally treated, to be able to come to some mutually acceptable diagnosis and treatment.  People who do not agree with the doctor’s diagnosis are frequently non-complaint.

Examples of Higher Education Institutions involved with Traditional Peoples’s Health and Nutrition Issues in the Pacific Northwest

In Western Washington, CWIS (Center for World Indigenous Studies) in Olympia, is a leader on the issue of treatment of mental health issues of Native Americans, which often overlap with addiction issues, in a more holistic and cultural appropriate, and less criminal and stigmatizing manner.  Lakota Sioux identify this as an important issue  and have fought for more than 20 years for issues like allowing sweat lodges and traditional indigenous mental health treatment in prisons where many Native Americans with addiction issues, often on top of what Western medicine identifies as mental health issues and which Native medicine identifies more are as a troubled spirit, end up. Also a hot topic among Native peoples is the issue of returning to a more traditional diet, improving nutrition, and recovering traditional medicines as a way to combat diseases currently at alarming rates among Native peoples such as high blood pressure and diabetis. Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Washington has this type of Traditional plant recovery and better nutrition program. 

The Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Network based at Penn State University but also doing extension work in Africa uses this type of information to inform its courses which often include international students like in Agriculture, and in its research and international collaborations agenda.

Examples of Third World Universities working with Traditional Health Practices, and related nutrition and agriculture, education, and resource access issues.

The SAN major (Food Security and Nutrition) at the National Pedagogical University (UPN) in Honduras which Adalid Martinez, a speaker at the 2014 WRIHC in Seattle, WA, works is an example of a Third World university response to this crisis. The research of Wendy Griffin and the Garifunas of the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras Los Garifunas de Honduras, and Wendy Griffin and the Pech Chief Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres Los Pech de Honduras, and work of Wendy Griffin with Garifuna healer, midwife, and buyei (shaman) Yaya are examples of  local Indian and Afro-Indigenous people and organizations working together with researchers about their local medicinal practices to inform what is taught in Intercultural Education at the community level, but also at the university level.  Wendy Griffin, Adalid Martinez and other Honduran professors at the UPN and UNAH and Honduran Normal School programs have used the research done at the community level about health and nutrition and traditional plants to inform and provide texts for courses like Anthropology of the Family for Home Economics majors, Anthropology of Food for Food Security and Nutrition majors, training of bilingual intercultural education teachers such as the Garifunas at the Normal School, Ethnology, and Intercultural Agriculture.

Examples of Canadian Indians and Universities active in the issue of traditional people’s health practices, nutrition and criminalization issues related to troubled Indigenous peoples ending up in the Criminal Justice and related Addiction programs.

These topics of health, traditional knowledge about health, land issues related to access to plants, animals, and marine resources used in traditional healing ceremonies, nutrition, and intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples, and more cultural appropriate ways of dealing with indigenous people with addiction and/or what Western medicine calls mental health issues, respecting traditional science regarding medicine in Native education  are also common topics in the writings of Canadian First Nation writers such as those who publish through Purich Publications in Canada, who are often the same people who had these topics included in ILO Convention 169 on Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Wikipedia Article Series and other Articles  Related to Issues related to Indigenous Health practices or Traditional health Practioners as a Social Issue and a Human Rights Issue

Wikipedia has a whole series of articles related to Indigenous Rights and also related topics like genocide, shamanism, traditional health practioners and diviners in Africa, and witchcraft.  These are related because claims that traditional medicine is witchcraft is often a reason given for not permitting it to be taught or used, and that the other people are witches or at least not-Christian is used as an excuse for genocide, of which the Central African Republic is a current example on the TV news, and also for a reason to criminalize traditional medicine practioners, a problem widely reported in Latin America and the Caribbean and in Africa, and previously a signficant problem even in Europe.

While most traditional health practices have been found to helpful, or at worst neutral in terms of health, a few such as the killing of Pygmies in Africa and eating them because eating Pygmy meat is believed to stop bullets, is an example of a death prevention technique which is a human rights issue and for which the Wikipedia article on Pygmies is one of the few sources easily available to the lay public about the death or enslavement or the denial of basic health care to Pygmies in their home countries, because they do not have citizenship cards.  Traditional news sources are limited because of space or editorial resources or interests or policies, but with more than 5 million articles in English Wikipedia and now over 1 million in Spanish, there is room in Wikipedia to cover what is happening in Surinam, in Namibia, in Honduras or Belize or Kenya and the Central African Republic, if the volunteer writers can cite a credible source, all places many people consider the middle of nowhere, but which other people consider home and vitally important to them.

 See Wikipedia articles, the Purich Publications website, the CWIS and NWIC website, the website of Garifuna in Peril www.garifunainperil.com  and Wendy Griffin’s description of her work and her publications and related articles, including Garifuna Immigrants Invisible available for free on the Garifuna in Peril website for more information on traditional health practices as a human rights issue.

Who can Edit and Write and Translate Wikipedia articles?

Anyone is welcome to edit and Write or translate Wikipedia articles.  There are materials online and in print that can help people learn to become Wikipedia editors or writers. There are also ways to get help from people online from Wikipedia volunteers. Wikipedia has special programs to help professors who want their students to get involved editting or translating Wikipedia articles, there is help for students who want to start their own student group of editors, and there are Volunteer Ambassadors who can help with training and learning the Wikipedia rules as far as what can go up in a Wikipedia article or how to nominate an article for being a really good article, or how to get help from someone who writes about a topic you are interested in.  See the separate article on Wikimedia Foundation Materials Available to help professors and people who want to write for Wikipedia.

On March 8th and 9th, representatives from various education initiatives and the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Team met in Prague to discuss the future of Wikipedia in Education. The fourteen attendees were from various parts of the globe including Nepal, the U.S., Ukraine, the Czech Republic, the U.K., Serbia, Canada, the Arab World and Mexico. The goal was to bring together the experience of varied efforts related to having students and educators collaborate with Wikipedia and brainstorm how best to expand efforts.

The first day was dedicated to sharing what has been done to date, what has worked well and what could be improved upon. The Global Education Team has identified more than 60 education programs and other initiatives so far with the aim of being able to provide some support for all. Most participants seek to sustain and scale up their programs, along with better communication and more support, in the next three to five years.

The second day was dedicated to developing goals for the Education Cooperative, a collaboration between international program leaders from the education community, dedicated to supporting the varied outreach efforts in the world in a more localized way. Areas of focus identified were communications, global recognition for programs and participants, resources and mentoring, with action items including a revamp of the education portal on outreach wiki, a unified newsletter, interviews of program leaders to determine needs for mentoring programs, and a survey of the education community to help define a means of giving education programs greater recognition. The last goal will take advantage of the upcoming Wikimania conference to interact with the wider Wikipedia community about goals and strategies.

 Wikipedia Outreach also is actively working with librarians in the Third World and in developing countries through a program called GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).  In Third World countries like Honduras, and even in the US, computers with Internet access are often clustered in libraries and librarians know almost more than anyone else  the problems and frustrations of limited access to information among the poor, the Third World, and rural people, and so libraries are a key access point to getting information for free on the Internet, and for disseminating information on how the Internet can be used to both share and obtain information.

For Additional Information about Wikipedia’s Medical  Project  see the following websites which have contact information.

An overview of the project between WikiProject Med and Translators without borders is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task_force

 

Their progess can be seen here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task_force/RTT with so far more than 3 million words transalted.

 

The list of 80 articles is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Health_care with so far 30 or so articles ready for translation and the others still needing work.

 

For More Information on the Wikipedia in Education Project look at the following website which has contact information:

https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Newsletter

 

Website of Wendy Griffin’s materials

www.healthandHonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com  English

www.historiahondurasindigena.blogspot.com  Español

 

 

Websites of Indigenous Peoples in the Northwest Working on Indigenous Health,including Mental Health, and Better Nutrition to Improve Health

www.cwis.org  (also working in Mexico)

www.nwic.edu

Also see Indigenous Environmental Network for more work on safe and healthy food issue.

 

Website and an example of a book from the Purich Publishing, recommended by the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Network, based at Penn State University which has the Whiting Center of Traditional Knowledge and Rural Development.

Elizabeth Koopman has identified Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit by Marie Battiste (Purich Publications, LTD, Saskatoon, Canada, 2013) as a "must read".

See the following website for additional information and other books on similar topics related to Canadian Indians and ILO Convention 169 topics and Indigenous Intellectional property rights for sale.

http://www.purichpublishing.com/?module=swm_ecommerce&page=product_detail&categoryID=1&productID=95

Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit

 

Marie Battiste

$35.00, 224 pages, index, bibliography, paper, 6 x 9, fall 2013
ISBN 9781895830774

Drawing on treaties, international law, the work of other Indigenous scholars, and especially personal experiences, Marie Battiste documents the nature of Eurocentric models of education, and their devastating impacts on Indigenous knowledge. Chronicling the negative consequences of forced assimilation and the failure of current educational policies to bolster the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal populations, Battiste proposes a new model of education. She argues that the preservation of Aboriginal knowledge is an Aboriginal right and a right preserved by the many treaties with First Nations. Current educational policies must undergo substantive reform. Central to this process is the rejection of the racism inherent to colonial systems of education, and the repositioning of Indigenous humanities, sciences, and languages as vital fields of knowledge. Battiste suggests the urgency for this reform lies in the social, technological, and economic challenges facing society today, and the need for a revitalized knowledge system which incorporates both Indigenous and Eurocentric thinking. The new model she advocates is based on her experiences growing up in a Mi’kmaw community, and the decades she has spent as a teacher, activist, and university scholar.

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Marie Battiste Biography

Marie Battiste, Professor of Educational Foundations, founder and first Academic Director, Aboriginal Education Research Centre, University of Saskatchewan, is a Mi’kmaw scholar, knowledge keeper, and educator from Potlotek First Nation, Nova Scotia. Marie earned degrees from the University of Maine (B.S.), Harvard (Ed.M.), and Stanford (Ed.D.). She has also received honorary degrees from the University of Maine at Farmington, St. Mary’s University, and Thompson Rivers University. A Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, she has also received the Distinguished Academic Award from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation Award in Education, the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal, the 125th Year Queen’s Award for Service to the Community, the Distinguished Researcher Award from the University of Saskatchewan, and Eagle Feathers from the Mi’kmaq Grand Council and Eskasoni community. She edited two highly influential books from UBC Press, texts that continue to be taught nationally and internationally: First Nations Education: The Circle Unfolds (1995) and Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (2000). She has coauthored, with J. Youngblood Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge: A Global Challenge (Purich Publishing 2000), identifying threats to Indigenous knowledge from global patenting and intellectual property regimes while affirming the linguistic and land-based grounds of resistance to paternalism and predation. A prolific writer and speaker, she has developed an international profile for advancing the decolonization of education, the development of Indigenous voice and vision, antiracist education as violence prevention, and the institutionalization of the Indigenous humanities, science, and  knowledge.