Scalpel and the Silver Bear

Introduction A Navajo weaver takes strands of wool and blends them into something of great beauty and magic; warp and weft combine into a pattern, and the pattern tells a story and has a spirit. This pattern then becomes a piece of the culture and has a life of its own. From the beginning I knew I had to do a similar thing with the strands of my storyto tell how a girl from a small and remote town on an Indian reservation was able to become a surgeon, able to work in the high-tech realm of a surgical operating room, and combine that with another story, about how ancient tribal ways and philosophies can help a floundering medical system find its way back to its original mission: healing. The first strand of my story shows that anything is possible. The words "Navajo" and "surgeon" are not often seen together. But a minority womancantravel across cultural, class, and educational borders and become a part of a medical world whose doors have been closed to minority people for most of its existence. I hope that native people will be encouraged by this story, and that they will follow their own special dreams. The second story is about how I have come to understand, after years of reflection, that my tribe has knowledge about medicine and healing, ways of thinking about health and illness that provide solutions to some of modern medicine's most daunting problems. It is common knowledge that modern medicine is in crisis. Never before has such an astounding array of medical treatments been available. The latest breakthroughs in research and methodology are stunning achievements and should be acknowledged as such, but along the way we have forgotten some of the things that heal us bestour relationships, how we live our lives, our feelings of wholeness and belonging. For all its technological advances and voyages into previously uncharted waters, modern medicine still has much to learn about healing. Now more than ever, patients themselves feel removed and forgotten, powerless in the face of the institutions that were created to help them. In many ways modern medicine has become a one-way systemfrom physician to patient. Physicians do the directing, talking at their patients. The other direction, the listening on the part of the physician, is becoming lost. This has left patients without a role in their own treatment. Patients want to be involved in their care and the decisions about how medicine is delivered to them. They want to feel like more than a set of organs and bones, nerves and blood, and participate in the process of restoring their bodies to health. Many patients want deeper, caring relationships with their physicians, and want to be able to choose their own physicians. Physicians complain that they are robbed of the time they need in order to create lasting relationships with their patients. In this new world of "managed care," both patients and physicians suffer, and decisions about health care are often out of the hands of both. This book is about my journey and my struggles. From my own mistakes, my own initial misadventures in patient care, I realized that although I was a good surgeon, I was not always a good healer. I went back to the healers of my tribe to learn what a surgical residency could not teach me. From them I have heard a resounding message: Everything in life is connected. Learn to understand the bonds between humans, spirit, and nature. Realize that our illness and our healing alike come from maintaining strong and healthy relationships in every aspect of our lives. In my culturethe Navajo culturemedicine is performed by ahataalii,someone who sees a person not simply as a body, but as a whole being. Body, mind, and spirit are seen as connected to other people, to families, to communities, and even to the planet and universe. All of these relationships need to beAlvord, Lori Arviso is the author of 'Scalpel and the Silver Bear', published 2000 under ISBN 9780553378009 and ISBN 0553378007.