Medicine in Mali

"Bourama Soumaoro's pharmacy looks much like any other: packets of pills in glass cabinets and jars of powder to fight everything from toothache to dysentery. But nowhere in the doctor's small shop in Mali's capital, Bamako, is there a chemically manufactured drug.

Soumaoro's remedies are made exclusively from ground-up local plants, the exact mixture based on knowledge passed down through the generations by traditional village healers.

"Culturally, we're born into traditional medicine rather than Western medicine. From being babies, our mothers take us to traditional healers to clean us and cure us with plants," Soumaoro told Reuters.

"The story of modern medicine is foreign to our culture."