Chapter Six: All-purpose Medicine: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Urban Market Solidarity and Dangerous Self-Integrative Medication in Child and Adolescent Care in Nigeria

Provisioning of quality, accessible, inclusive and affordable health-care services is instrumental to youth development. Many public health policies and programmes regarding youth health have represented some failure, in formulation and implementation, at various governmental levels. The failure reflects in many layers on youth living conditions of poverty and marginalization, as reflected in their poor health-seeking behaviour, education and livelihoods (Agnes, 2010). Nigerian health policies and programmes are formulated and implemented in ways that often exclude groups in the lower socio-economic strata of the society. This often reflects the manifestation of inequalities and social exclusion in health care, which has, over the years, aided the continuous patronage and sustenance of “all-purpose medicine” (Kamorudeen, 2012). In contemporary Nigerian society, many adolescents and youth have limited or no access to adolescent or youth friendly health services, which had further encouraged the practice of dangerous integrative medicine even for reproductive health problems (Crawford et al., 2021; Odimegwu and Adewoyin, 2021). Autoethnography presents a unique strategy in social science and humanities research by allowing researchers to reflect on social issues based on personal experience gained over time in the course of research and practice. Autoethnography advances authors’ deep reflective engagement with the contextual realities of social issues without neglecting epistemological, empirical and ontological facts. This is because an autoethnographic researcher deeply engages the realities that have been experientially accessed and assessed over time to generate personal reflections that advance contextual understanding of social and cultural issues (Lapadat, 2017; Pitard, 2018). Hence, in this research, we present a collaborative autoethnographic reflection (see Lapadat, 2017) on sociative¹ socialization and dangerous self-integrative medication in child and adolescent care in urban markets in Nigeria, based on empirical and experiential observations and knowledge we have gathered since about 2005 while studying market culture in South-western Nigeria. Self-integrative medication in child and adolescent care as used here refers to the practice of self-admixture of various modern medications and herbs in child and adolescent health management by nursing mothers and other caregivers within the family system. The practice is locally called akanpo (mixed), thus assumed to be an all-purpose medicine (ogun gbogbonse), especially in South-western Nigeria. Self-integrative medication in child and adolescent care is a practice that is commonplace among Nigerian mothers in the low socio-economic group, with dangerous implications for public health (Iribhogbe and Odoya, 2020, Oshikoya et al., 2007, 2008).