Making Room in the Allopathic Arena for Native Practitioners: The Navajo Example

The increasing diversity of the US population has encouraged health care facilities to broaden their scope of medical care to include more attention to the cultural orientation of their patients beyond challenges of linquistic or religious differences. This presentation focuses on one federal hospital on the Navajo Reservation that has established a formal role and place in its clinical arena for native healers (practitioners) who work alongside physicians and other health care providers. As staff of the hospital, the native practitioners offer a number of services to Navajo patients, including bedside care, counseling, receiving and initiating referrals, conducting home visits, and serve as cultural educators and consultants to the hospital staff and other health care agencies. This presentations will discuss the benefits of this service for the patients as well as the challenges places on the practitioners by accreditation rules, hospital safety, and/or their own traditonal cultural rules that determine the kinds of healing ceremonies that can be performed outside the patient's home.