BioMed
Diné surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord reflects on healing alongside surgery, including traditional healers at chemotherapy bedsides and the support of family and community.
Children raised to show humility by not raising their hands get read by mainstream institutions as uninterested and disengaged. A behaviour that means respect in one culture is taken as a sign of poor attitude in another, and judgment follows from the misreading.
Children punished for speaking their own language and taught their culture was inferior grew into parents who did not pass on traditional beliefs. Within two or three generations people lost the very guidance on how to live that could have kept them strong.
In schools that could not recruit or keep teachers and lacked funding, a student could earn top marks while very little was actually being taught. The gap appears only later, when that student meets demanding subjects elsewhere and finds herself unprepared.
When someone from an underrepresented group reaches a high position, others may credit it to filling a quota rather than to hard work and merit. The suspicion itself becomes an extra burden that achievement alone cannot remove.
How both the patient and the surgeon feel going into treatment can affect recovery time, complications after surgery, and even survival. Healing is not only done to a body; the emotional state on both sides of the scalpel is part of the treatment.
What a patient believes caused an illness shapes how that illness unfolds, for better or worse. A patient sure a curse or a past shock made them sick is carrying that belief into treatment, and a doctor who ignores it is ignoring a working force.
In this view, being well means living in balance and harmony with all the parts of your world: family, community, land and spirit. Illness is a sign that something in those connections has fallen out of balance, not only that one organ has failed.
Modern medicine often runs as a one-way flow from physician to patient, with technical skill standing in for understanding. Even mastery of high-tech surgery can leave out the whole person who came seeking healing, putting the care system in danger of losing its heart.
Patients on chemotherapy did better when a traditional healer was at the bedside. A gravely ill person can be supported by a whole community gathering for an all-night ceremony, adding something that drugs and procedures alone do not supply.
A gifted student sent among wealthy children of another culture wanted to be like them, but the differences were too plain to erase. Shame about one's origins combined with the wider destruction of a people, and the damage showed up as lasting personal suffering such as alcoholism.