Community Based Cross Sectional Study upon the Knowledge, Attitude and Practices of Traditional Medicine in West Ares Zone of South West Ethiopia

Background: Traditional medicine (TM) has sustained its approval in a developing country and an extensive acceptance is a well predictable fact particularly in rural developing countries like Ethiopia. Objective: To assess community knowledge, attitude and practice of traditional medicine in Kofele town, West Ares Zone, Southwest Ethiopia. Materials and Methods: The study was carried out on a total of 271 sampled participants recruited by systematic random sampling from May 15 to June 15, 2017, at Kofele town of West Ares Zone, South-East Ethiopia. Data were analysed using SPSS version 20. Observations and Results: Among 271 samples, 50.2% of participants were female. The mean (±s.d.) age of the participants was 32.5 (±12.4) years. Most of them had heard about traditional medicine (98.5%) and more than half of participants (62.2%) had heard about TM from family. The majority (73.1%) of people knew traditional medicine as one of the components of the health care system, from those 72.7% of them knew at least one preparation of the plant product. The majority (99.72%) of the participants were aware of the major side effects of TM (52.4.4%). Remedies were reported to be administered through oral (77%), dermal or tropical (8.1%) and buccal routes (6.2%). About 61.3% of them prefer traditional medical practices (TMP) because they are cheap. About 78.1 % of the respondents agreed upon providing necessary training on dosage and side effect of traditional medicine to the traditional medical practitioners. After the utilisation of TM, 72.7% of the respondents showed improvement and 27.3% of the participants had worsened their complaints with no changes. Conclusion: The study showed that most proportion of the participants did not prefer to use TM withstanding that they lived in urban communities with better access to modern medical care and medical practitioners. To use TM as a valuable alternative to predictable medicine, further investigation must be undertaken to determine the efficiency of alternative medicine to human beings.