A champion for preventive medicine led the fight against diabetes in Bermuda – one of the island’s most rampant chronic diseases.

Femi Bada was also a former chairman of the Bermuda Diabetes Association.

Dr Bada advocated the use of alternative techniques such as acupuncture and hypnotherapy alongside mainstream medicine.

He told The Royal Gazette in 2004: “I get inspired with all the body as an entity.

“My main interest is preventive medicine. Prevent diseases before they occur. Acupuncture and medical hypnosis are complements in alternative care and I practise both.

“As a physician I try to provide a service with an emphasis on anticipatory medicine. In doing this I hope to be able to prevent disease whenever possible.”

Nigerian-born, Dr Bada practised medicine in the West African country followed by England and Trinidad and Tobago before moving to Bermuda in 1997.

He said he knew from childhood that he wanted to be a physician.

Dr Bada attended Bishop’s Stortford College in England and the University of Bristol, where he qualified as a physician in 1969.

He came to the island as the assigned physician to the Bermuda police, prisons, and fire medical services.

But three years later, he branched out into his own practice.

He was also an inaugural member of the Bermuda Health Council when it was created in 2006.

Dr Bada was married to Puisne Judge Charles-Etta Simmons, and is survived by his children Yinka, Kathleen, Nike and Amanda Bada, Abigail Hobden, and stepson Taaj Jamal.

Among his services was offering hypnosis to help people quit smoking.

In 2009, he was appointed by the Government to a task force to draw up guidelines on diabetes care.

The disease is one of the island’s most prevalent chronic non-communicable conditions.

He sounded the alarm over diabetes as the island’s “invisible epidemic”, highlighting its role in serious conditions from blindness to chronic kidney disease.

Dr Bada said in 2016: “It is time for diabetes to become a visible disease, like those that have had that privilege for so many decades.

“Those diseases have not had the same deadly, wildfire effects that diabetes is capable of.

“It can unleash such fury so as to ravage this beautiful and relatively peaceful small island that I now call my home.”

· Adebola Olufemi Bada, a physician and former chairman of the Bermuda Diabetes Association, was born on September 9, 1942. He died in December 2021, aged 79.