Traditional wisdom of rural people about primary health care of children

Abstract

<span style="mso-bidi-language:HI">An attempt has been made to document the indigenous methods of treatment followed by rural families for curing/treating common ailments among children. Data were generated from 300 rural families covering 60 villages of Bareilly district in Uttar Pradesh. A total of 124 indigenous practices were identified and documented under 27 different common ailments found among children. It was observed that 50% respondents were practicing as many as 4-6 different indigenous treatments followed by 42% respondents practicing 7-9 practices. Diarrhea followed by burn and cold was the most common ailment treated by 73, 62 and 60% respondents, respectively.

<span style="mso-bidi-language:HI">More than 30% of the respondents had the local technical knowledge about fever, dysentery, vomiting, boils, measles, wounds, cough, conjunctivitis and worm infestations separately. About 29% of the respondents were following indigenous treatments of stomachache followed by constipation (25%), stomatitis (22.33%), pneumonia (18.66%), trachoma (13.0 %) and fractures (5.0%). Less then 5% rural families were found to have the knowledge about indigenous treatments regarding, dislocation, chicken pox, scorpion bite, snake bite, removal of thorn and sunstroke, etc.

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