Healer [noun]

While healers often use remedies such as powdered roots, saffron-inked scriptures dissolved in water or incantations to treat mental health conditions, they are increasingly becoming the link to modern mental health services.

Zanzibar alone is home to an estimated 800 traditional healers, and across Africa, the number of healers is about 100 times that of conventional practitioners.

The 29-year-old traditional healer, or mganga in Kiswahili, is part of a new movement of healers who are collaborating with mainstream medical practitioners to reduce the mental health treatment gap in the semiautonomous archipelago.

A 2018 study in Kenya showed that trained healers and lay health workers could help reduce the treatment gap — the proportion of patients who remain untreated — to 32 percent from an average of 75 percent in low-income countries.

While psychiatric services are often hard to access — there are approximately 30 psychiatrists in a country of more than 50 million people, according to World Health Organization estimates — traditional healers are never far away.

But the defect which they bring to light will not be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign healer.

A former clergyman of this parish appears to have been notable as a healer of bodies as well of souls.

We have already had a glimpse of the need there was, even in taking away human sickness, that the Healer Himself should suffer.

He made a speech in which he begged the sufferers to turn their eyes to the Great Healer, who alone could comfort.

The tone might almost have deceived Mahbub Ali, but it failed entirely with the healer of sick pearls.