Examination of the reluctance to seek biomedical treatment for a variety of illnesses among the Fulani reflects how treatment decisions and choices between bush medicine and biomedicine are not founded on beliefs of the origin of the illness or founded on considerations of presumed efficacy of treatment or even considerations of cost or availability of services. Instead individual treatment decisions appear as a personal choice fashioned in a way that gives full attention to social standards. Beliefs in what others are apt to think about the illness, about the ill person and about how treatment is being pursued, basically social beliefs, are most important. The case indexes pulaaku as a guiding principle in ethnomedicine, in a manner in which pulaaku has been found to be a guiding principle in other domains of Fulani life. Additionally, drawing from another companion study, of Malinké treatment, we again find social belief determining what one will do. In this case, the stress of in-laws impose their will on the way mothers treat their children’s illnesses. From this evidence, I suggest more research emphasis on the mundane concerns of what family and neighbors will think about one’s illness and about treatment and less emphasis on metaphysical systems of explanation or on exotic cures.