1.1 Primary healthcare and traditional medicine Primary Health Care (PHC) is the key to the development of a national health policy based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally acceptable to individuals and families in the community and through their full participation and at a cost that the community and the country can afford, in order to maintain, at every stage of their development, in the spirit of self-reliance and self determination. It is the first level of contact for the individual, family and the community within the national health care system, bringing health care as close as possible to where people live and work and thus constitutes the first element of a continuing health care process (WHO, 1978a). A health system, based on primary health care was adopted as the means of achieving the goal of health for all. Most developing countries of the world, for which the scheme was designed, have failed to seriously implement it up till this moment. Traditional Medicine is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO, 1978a) as the sum total of knowledge or practices whether explicable or inexplicable, used in diagnosing, preventing or eliminating a physical, mental or social disease which may rely exclusively on past experience or observations handed down from generation to generation, verbally or in writing. It also comprises therapeutic practices that have been in existence often for hundreds of years before the development of modern scientific medicine and are still in use today without any documented evidence of adverse effects. The explicable form of Traditional Medicine can be described as the simplified, scientific and the direct application of plant, animal or mineral materials for healing purposes and which can be investigated, rationalized and explained scientifically.