The Entrepreneurial Sustainability of Tibb Health Care Practitioners Compared to other Complementary Medicine Practitioners

Abstract

The Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world leading to the perception that everyone involved in this industry will be financially viable and have entrepreneurial sustainable businesses. The reality is different. Tibb Healthcare Practitioners are very successful practitioners as long as they work within the Tibb Medical Centres, but as soon as they venture into private practices, it seems that they are unable to create sustainable and profitable practices. This is very surprising, since they are formally registered and regulated by the Allied Health Professions Council of South Africa (AHPCSA) and has practice numbers just like medical doctors do. Medical doctors in South Africa are able to create and sustain financially viable practices so the question arises why Tibb Healthcare Practitioners are struggling to accomplish this. This question is furthermore expanded when speculating whether it is only Tibb Practitioners struggling to create entrepreneurial sustainable private practices or whether other Complementary Medicine Practitioners are having the same difficulties. When engaging with the general public on the topic of CAM it seems like Homeopathy is the profession associated with the industry. A comparison between Homeopathy and Tibb is therefore necessary. Exploratory qualitative research was conducted through semi-structured interviews of Tibb Practitioners and the research findings were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The findings clearly revealed that Homeopathy training is far superior to the training of other CAM practitioners which also included training in business skills which is clearly lacking in the curricula of the other CAM practitioner training. The result seems to be that Tibb Healthcare Practitioners feel inferior to medical doctors as well as to Homeopaths leading to them believing that the Tibb profession can be financially viable, yet they are unwilling to take the risk because it seems that they do not believe in themselves and in their own abilities as they do in the profession.