Indigenous Healing: Does it Work?
Today, many Native people seek care from traditional healers and use traditional healing practices in their daily lives. Many also use Western medicine in conjunction with indigenous healing. As a result, these two approaches can work together, rather than against each other.
The effectiveness of Western medicine for many health conditions is widely recognized. But what about indigenous healing: does it work?
A recent study by the medical anthropologist James Waldram brings this question into focus. Waldram has worked with Native communities for many years, especially Aboriginal/First Nations people of Canada. He has written several books on Native health, including The Way of the Pipe and Revenge of the Windigo. In his recent publication, “Transformative and restorative processes: revisiting the question of efficacy of indigenous healing,” Waldram compares Western and indigenous approaches.
He relies on two key concepts. One is restorative healing, whose goal is to return patients to the state of health and functioning they enjoyed before illness or disability occurred. The other is transformative healing. In this approach, patients set out on a “journey” or process of change that leads to a better and healthier life, but does not necessarily restore a past state of functioning. Much Western medicine is restorative – but Western psychotherapy, in particular, emphasizes personal transformation.
Waldram recognizes that any approach to wellness can include aspects of both restoration and transformation. However, the question of “efficacy” (Does this approach work? Does it result in healing or cure?) is different for each process.
In restorative healing, it is relatively easy to tell if a treatment works. Someone with tuberculosis can take antibiotics and eliminate the disease; someone with appendicitis can have surgery and become symptom-free. For transformative healing, however, it can be difficult to tell if the right changes have happened.
Waldram notes that indigenous healing, as practiced today, is mostly a transformative process. His understanding echoes the words of Don Coyhis, a Mohican who uses the concept of the Medicine Wheel to help Native people recover from addictions. For Coyhis, becoming sober and well means “entering a journey of healing and balance . . . it also means recovering culturally.” Waldram quotes another indigenous healer who uses very similar language: “I began my journey towards spiritual healing, mental healing, and physical healing.”
Both Waldram and Coyhis describe indigenous healing as a combination of practices from many different tribal cultures, rather than as a single tradition handed down from the past. For example, the sweat lodge, which originated in Plains tribes, is now widely used by people across North America, regardless of their heritage. As Waldram observes, Native patients “may find themselves turning to healers from completely different cultural traditions, and engaging in practices that were traditionally foreign to their people.”
Waldram argues that indigenous healing in the era before European colonization was both restorative and transformative. He notes that many North American tribes once had traditions of botanical remedies, wound care, and bone-setting. These are now forgotten. Modern members of those same tribes are likely to seek Western doctors for infectious diseases, broken bones, and other injuries. Therefore, to gain a fuller understanding of indigenous healing as it may have looked before colonization, Waldram did fieldwork among the Q’eqchi Maya in Central America.
Q’eqchi healers offer medicinal plants: photo by Douglas Reeser
Like indigenous people everywhere, the Q’eqchi have suffered colonization and disenfranchisement. Fortunately, they have also managed to keep their original language and many aspects of their traditional farming culture. In particular, they maintain a well-developed system of traditional healing that combines ancient botanical knowledge with Catholic and Maya spirituality. The Q’eqchi theory of health emphasizes the proper flow of blood through the body; it also understands sickness as either “hot” or “cold.” Although Q’eqchi healers recognize the value of Western medicine, they are also comfortable using traditional approaches to treat a wide range of problems. These include snakebite, infections, and gastrointestinal disorders.
Traditional healing is widely used by the Q’eqchi people today. This is partly because it is cheaper and more accessible than Western medicine, and partly because patients feel it works.
The average medical visit with a Q’eqchi healer lasts 6.5 minutes. The healer briefly questions the patient about the problem, but he does not engage in extended conversation or explain what he is doing. Then the healer prays, usually so quietly that the patient can barely hear him, using an archaic dialect that even most Q’eqchi cannot understand. Then the healer usually prescribes a plant medicine. Treatment often involves one or more additional sessions, similar to the first. Full payment is due only if and when the patient fully recovers. The amount depends on the patient’s financial means.
Except for prayers and payment options, Waldram notes that “the Q’eqchi clinical encounter actually has many parallels with biomedicine.” Notably, Q’eqchi healers are comfortable treating patients from all cultural backgrounds, and do not attempt to educate their patients about traditional beliefs.
Encounters with Aboriginal healers in Canada are quite different, according to Waldram’s research. Canadian healers typically develop ongoing connections with their patients, who are almost always Native people themselves. An individual healing session might last for several hours, and might include several patients at once. A key element of healing is reconnecting Native patients with their traditional cultural heritage. They must learn “the proper way to live one’s life in respectful relationship to others and the world around.” The notion of “cure” is foreign to this approach, according to Waldram: “One is never completely healed, they say, the journey never ends, and challenges are ever-present.”
Notably, Aboriginal healers themselves are likely to speak of their own journeys toward wellness. To explain their approach, Waldram quotes one healer with a personal history of alcoholism:
“The more I stayed away from my Native ways, the more I suffered and I became a person who blamed alcohol. . . . I went back to the traditional way, understanding the way our forefathers lived, and learning about the value system of life . . . . And then I began my journey . . .”
Waldram concludes that indigenous healing in North America is not about returning to healing practices that existed before European colonization. Instead, it is a modern approach created by Native people in response to historical trauma: loss of land, loss of culture, loss of millions of Native lives. For healers, the way forward is to connect with one’s cultural heritage. Yet this heritage is largely a modern construction that reflects “very contemporary cultural and political forces.” Beliefs and traditions from distinct tribal cultures are blended together in contemporary constructs such as the Way of the Pipe and the Medicine Wheel. Native people embrace familiar metaphors of “balance” and “the journey” that are widely shared across non-Native contexts.
Whether all this “works” is a difficult question to answer. One way to assess the “efficacy” of indigenous healing is to look at behavior. Do significant others see positive changes in the patient’s behavior? Is he or she coping better with life? Is there more happiness and less pain? Is the patient more at peace? Is the journey moving forward?
As one healer put it:
“Until the last moment when the spirit finally gives up the body back to Mother Earth, we will not get to a point where there isn’t any further wound in the heart, in the body, the mind, and the spirit that couldn’t use some attention.”
Articles:
Buchwald D, Beals J, Manson SM. Use of traditional health practices among Native Americans in a primary care setting. Medical Care 2000;38(12):1191–99. Abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11186298
Coyhis D, Simonelli R. The Native American healing experience. Substance Use and Misuse 2008;43(12-13):1927-49. Abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19016172
Waldram JB. Transformative and restorative processes: revisiting the question of efficacy of indigenous healing. Medical Anthropology 2013;32(3):191-207. Abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23557005