Cultural safety and family medicine in Africa

Abstract

To the Editor: It took 3 continents and 11 years post-qualification for me to realise that Western medicine's approach to improving health care in Africa may be flawed. The realisation occurred as a result of reading Belfrage's experiences of working within the Aborigine community in terra nullius (Australia's vast inhabited interior) and seeing how, as a doctor of European descent, she and her culture, and the local Aborigines (Alyawarr) and their culture, perceived the world in fundamentally different ways.