The East African monarch and his ministers spoke German throughout, and the Far Eastern aid delegation could not understand a word they were saying. This made them extremely nervous; after all, their fate was now entirely in someone else's hands.
Berleide said, "The arrangements for the doctors mainly involve two levels. The first is concentration. In our Health Ministry's practice, we have found that traditional Chinese medicine is a system. To introduce a system, one must build a framework, and a framework cannot be completed by one or two doctors. It requires a group of relatively authoritative and exceptionally capable people working together.
East Africa already has a number of doctors of Far Eastern origin, but their professional qualifications are often inadequate. In the Far East, there is a particular term for them: 'village doctors.' It refers to people who practice medicine in the countryside.
Many of them came from families that had practiced medicine for generations, so they inherited skills and secret prescriptions for treating patients. Although they did not possess medical licenses, they could still cure illnesses and save lives, even treating many difficult and complicated diseases. They were experienced and had seen a great many patients.
However, because their knowledge was passed down through word of mouth and personal instruction, deviations in theory were inevitable. Family misfortunes could even cause extremely severe breaks in the transmission of knowledge. As a result, we have found that when some doctors faced the same illness, their prescriptions and methods of treatment differed. Some of these differences were good, some bad, and they were highly unstable.
Therefore, the Kingdom should establish unified standards for traditional Chinese medicine. On the one hand, doctors with genuine talent and learning should lead the formulation of those standards. On the other, actual cases should be