Coyote Medicine

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, Phd, is a half-breed Native American who took years becoming a medical doctor. In his early attempts at residency he voiced his idealistic views about how medicine is institutionalized but has little to do with the patients' mental or emotional sufferings while their physical symptoms are measured by numbers on medical tests and treatments correspond to the test-documented area of illness, not considering the human under treatment at all. Lewis as an intern was startled into the awareness of the human when four formerly healthy men were suddenly dying of kidney failure because doctors felt the men, because of slightly high counts of proteinura, were given biopsies ... and all four healthy men from the biopsies had kidney failure. And thus Lewis began to question allopathic medicine. For several years Lewis postponed his internship and explored various aspects of  Native American cultural health heritage in his search for complimentary holistic medicine that considers the whole person — the physical, mental and spiritual.

Below are some of his astute comments on the allopathic-complimentary medicine spectrum that he made in his book Coyote Medicine (1997):

"The academic world had met my thirst for knowledge but it had proven to be as spiritually barren as it was as intellectually bracing." (p. 33) 

"Native American religion was illegal at that time [1970s, until 1975], having been outlawed by an act of Congress in 1895. Although school children learn that the Constitution protects freedom of religion, Native Americans were long denied the right to practice theirs." (p. 36) 

"Eddie continued to explain the [Kiowa] sweat lodge to me, how it was built, what would happen. 'It's supposed to symbolize the whole world,' he said. 'Also the womb of Mother Earth. Even though it's a half sphere above ground, you're supposed to think of it as a whole sphere going doing into the earth as far as it stand above the earth. The pit in the middle of the lodge is where you put the stones. Think of those as your placenta. You're returning to the womb of Mother Earth. The placenta is then to doctor you and to take away the wastes and the toxins that you no longer need. You're going to sweat them out. The stones get filled up with the energy of the sun when the wood is burned. Then they give that energy back to you. That is the medicine.'" (p. 40) 

"The song 'Amazing Grace' is the national anthem of the Cherokee people. It was made famous from being sung on the Trail of Tears, from Tennessee to Oklahoma." (p. 67) 

"Medicine for the most part is generated numbers and statistics, t-tests and chi-squares, distributors and product moments — objective results that can be disputed and defended ... quantitative studies. Qualitative studies by recording stasis such as the method Lewis Mehl-Madrona used had its own merits, and the use of the deconstructionists view of reality, which has become mainstream thinking in behavioral medicine." (p. 145-6)

On psychiatric medicine:

"'We prescribe Thorazine of Haldol or lithium for bizarre behavior as casually as we prescribe antibiotics for bacterial infections,' Luke, chief of the psychiatric ward, would say. "Isn't chaining yourself to City Hall and reciting passages of Howl a more complicated problem than strep throat?" (p. 151) 

"The psychiatrists' tool kit includes four major categories of drugs — anti-anxiety drugs called benezodiazepines, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers," e.g. Klonopin, Valium, Xanax, Librium, Antivan, Loxapine, Haldol, Mellaril, Pamelor, Lithium, valproic acid, Tegretol, Elavil, Zoloft, Parnate, and Nardil. (p. 163).

Other books similar to Coyote Medicine are located at Native American Healing.