Ministry considers Chiropractic health care

Saturday, November 7, 2009 (The Mirror Pg 25)

By Rebecca Kwei
Chiropractic practice is being considered for the mainstream of health delivery in the country.
This is under the Ministry of Health’s quality assurance policy on training and practice of complementary health practitioners.
This was made known by the Minister of Health designate, Dr Ben Kumbour, at the launch of the Chiropractic and Wellness Centre’s corporate wellness programme in Accra.
Chiropractic is an alternative medical system which takes a different approach from standard medicine in treating health problems. Its basic concept is that the body has a powerful self-healing ability and the chiropractic professionals use a type of hands-on therapy called spinal manipulation or adjustment.
According to the minister, in line with the programme, the chiropractic doctor was to be seen as a primary contact practitioner, who is a collaborator and sees to the optimum function of the body.
Additionally, he said, guidelines for regulatory control of all wellness spas and complementary alternative medicine practices by the ministry were being rolled out for implementation.
He said the board of the Regulatory Council would soon be inaugurated to enable the registry for complementary medicine to become fully operational.
Dr Kumbour said the launch of the corporate wellness programme had come at a time when Ghana was experiencing an increase in lifestyle-related diseases.
“Much of the work of the middle and upper classes falls under the category which is described as sedentary, and this, coupled with opportunities for over-indulgence while doing less manual work, puts these classes of the population at serious risk of cardio-vascular and other lifestyle diseases,” he observed.
He noted that a key component of every successful nation was a healthy and vibrant workforce and that the workplace was, therefore, the perfect place to start a health and wellness revolution.
“Diseases need hospitals to be treated, and the public health service needs the community to support each other in disease prevention but wellness depends on the choices an individual makes on personal discipline, moral behaviour, lifestyle and early health preventive interventions,” Dr Kumbour added.
He expressed the hope that insurance companies would begin to pay for chiropractic services to enable more people to access the service.
The CEO of the Chiropractic and Wellness Centres, Dr Marcus Manns, said in Ghana and globally, employees and employers were grappling with the challenge of maintaining a healthy balance between being productive at work while maintaining a quality life at home.
He said the centre thus felt it was necessary to introduce a programme that specifically targeted the workplace.
The corporate wellness programme was designed such that the centre would introduce and maintain a wellness culture in an organisation that creates happier, healthier, more focused and productive employees.
“The health choices your employees make today create a healthy or sick bottom line for your company tomorrow,” Dr Manns added.
He noted that preventable diseases made up 70 per cent of the entire burden of illness and associated costs to corporations.
The features of the corporate wellness programme include quarterly corporate wellness workshops, advanced strategies to adapt to stress, workstation exercises, ergonomics for life, on-site massages and corporate wellness consultancy.