Ghana traditional medicine council urges codification, warns of drive on quacks

Ghana's traditional medicine regulator has asked the government to back the codification of traditional medicine. Dr Yakubu Tobor Yusuf, Registrar of the Traditional Medicine Practice Council (TMPC), made the call at the Volta Traditional Medicine Heritage Conference in Ho, in Ghana's Volta Region, in remarks reported on Wednesday, 4 November 2026. The conference was organised with the Volta Regional Coordinating Council and marked 25 years of the council's work, under the banner TMPC@25. Dr Yusuf said codification would improve healthcare delivery and protect the country's cultural heritage, and he signalled that the council would soon begin what he called a "cleaning drive" against quacks.

Codification means writing down, in a fixed and agreed form, what a medical tradition contains: which remedies are used, how they are prepared, for which conditions and by whom. Without it, a regulator has little to check a practitioner's work against. Dr Yusuf tied his call to a wider push for standards. "The World Health Organization is calling on every nation to set standards. Let's do same here in Ghana," he was reported as saying. His main argument was a practical one: if herbal and orthodox treatments are already being given side by side, including to cancer patients, the herbal side needs written standards just as the orthodox side has them.

The registrar's warning about quacks fits a pattern of enforcement by the council over the past months, when it has closed unlicensed herbal shops and spa centres and spoken of a large gap between the number of people practising and the number on its register. A "cleaning drive" would extend that work. The council has not yet said when the drive will start or how it will be carried out.

The regional minister's remarks pointed to the other half of the picture. James Gunu asked for public education on safe use of traditional medicine through radio, television, markets, churches, mosques, schools and community centres. He also encouraged partnerships with universities and research institutions to study indigenous medicinal knowledge scientifically, while protecting natural resources and community interests, and he voiced concern that younger people were gradually losing confidence in traditional medicine. A speaker from a herbal centre at Dzodze told the conference that research, processing and commercialisation of medicinal plants could bring significant economic benefits.

For readers who follow Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, the debate in Ghana will sound familiar. The World Health Organization's Global Traditional Medicine Centre is being built at Jamnagar in Gujarat, and on 17 September 2026 the WHO released a research agenda for traditional, complementary and integrative medicine. The WHO said 27 member states had made formal, time-bound commitments to advance traditional medicine research at its global summit in New Delhi in December 2025. Ghana's call for written standards is one country's step along the same road: tradition kept, but measured against evidence.

Peepals calculation: The registrar's figures mean traditional medicine is now offered at 2.5 times as many public health facilities as before, a rise of 150% (150 / 60 = 2.5; 90 more facilities on a base of 60). Our calculation from the reported figures.

Short-term: Unlicensed herbal sellers and practitioners in Ghana face closer checks once the council's promised "cleaning drive" begins. Licensed practitioners may be asked to show that their work meets the council's standards.

Long-term: If the government backs codification, Ghana would have a written reference for its traditional remedies, which would make it easier to train practitioners, check products, run research and offer the services safely inside public hospitals.

Who is affected: Traditional medicine practitioners and herbal product makers in Ghana, patients who use herbal care alongside hospital treatment, the Ghana Health Service, and researchers in universities working on medicinal plants.

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