Nigeria needs a new breed of medical textbooks

Nigeria’s finest minister of health, Professor Ransome Kuti, once said Nigeria needs a new breed of medical doctors trained according to international standards but malleable enough to function effectively in our communities where resources are limited, and patients’ conditions are dire.  He cited UNILORIN’s Community-Based Experience and Services (COBES) as a befitting model because it […]

Nigeria’s finest minister of health, Professor Ransome Kuti, once said Nigeria needs a new breed of medical doctors trained according to international standards but malleable enough to function effectively in our communities where resources are limited, and patients’ conditions are dire. 

He cited UNILORIN’s Community-Based Experience and Services (COBES) as a befitting model because it exposes medical students to their communities early in their training and prepares them mentally for the task ahead. 

Beyond having training systems that expose medical students to their communities, we also need textbooks that expose Nigerian students to local data and nuances. These nuances are often wrapped in descriptives like blacks, Africans, developing countries, and low and middle-income countries.

Some time ago, a lecturer teaching about a disease said the disease is common during winter. Winter? That’s an interesting term for me, a student used to terms like rainy season, dry season, and harmattan. Which one is winter?

The issue goes beyond semantics. When some diseases are discussed, we hear the peculiar risk factors for Americans, Indians, and Europeans, but when it gets to Nigeria and Nigerians, the data becomes muddled into numbers and projections that aren’t particularly descriptive. The incident rates I get are of people who don’t share my weather, diet, or skin colour. Where are our own?

Currently, I rely on international textbooks written by Indian and European, or American authors. These books are international in scope but local in presentation. They use local statistics, data, and terms as much as they use the so-called global standards.  

My lecturers are doing well in infusing local reference values in their PowerPoint slides and discussions, which is a great start, but we need to do more and better. We need textbooks suited for our contexts, written in our vocabularies, something that will prepare us for the world but also keep us grounded in realities at home. 

I know that producing these textbooks won’t come easy. Research is expensive and we need extensive ones to generate baseline data for our textbooks. We need an intimate understanding of society and to come up with appropriate language to translate local phenomena into shared understanding.

Many of the things we call fever, for instance, are differentials of different diseases we don’t have local names for. Doing research in this context, therefore, will be herculean.

Still, it’s doable. In secondary school, I went through my father’s Abbott Physics, but P. N. Okeke’s Physics and Ababio’s New School Chemistry were local textbooks that served me equally well. They used local examples, wordings, and descriptions that I could relate to. We need such textbooks in our medical schools and universities.

Some Nigerian medical textbooks are doing an excellent job, like Falase for Clinical Methods, Agboola for O and G, and Azubuike for Paediatrics. I suppose similar textbooks are available for Chemistry, Engineering, Education, Religion, and Statistics. Still, when push comes to shove, I know many medical students will go for Hutchinson, Ten Teachers, and Nelson’s Paediatrics, respectively. 

The difference in the quality of local and international textbooks is clear. Beyond the quality of writing, design, and print, you could see how these textbooks use local examples and data to drive home their points. We need similar reference materials to guide our training and discussions, even as we seek to meet and maintain international standards. 

I am not asking us to replace international textbooks with local ones. International textbooks expose us to global standards and often reflect the state-of-the-art and science of the subjects they cover. 

However, training our ears on pianos shouldn’t stop us from learning our drums. I only ask that we have local supplements, if not alternatives, to support our education. We have fine Nigerian textbooks already filling this need. We must build on the momentum to produce a new breed of textbooks for Nigerians. 

 

Bello Hussein Adoto, a researcher, sent this via [email protected]