A strong plea for a broader based attitude towards medicines and healing comes from Lewis Mehl-Madrona of New York, in a letter published in Science for July 14. He reveals that he is an American Indian and follows the traditions spiritual and medicinal of his ancestors. He is certain that "religious commitment is an important contributor to health and well-being" and argues that many conventional physicians agree with him that this wider attitude benefits patients.
He reports that, in his own practice, adding traditional American Indian medicine to conventional evidence-based therapy has brought additional benefit. It is not a question of comparing traditional with conventional methods or asking patients to choose between them, but of presenting an integrated approach.
Practitioners in conventional medicine have much to learn from indigenous healers regarding their methods of treatment. Involving traditional systems has the effect of applying more psychosocial orientation than is paid by conventional methods of medicine and draws attention to the importance of emotion, family ties and community and spiritual life in confronting an illness and in one way or another overcoming its effects. Only by adopting the holistic approach can questions involving major changes in habits, diet and social relationships be faced constructively.
This point of view offers a challenge we should be wise to face. The gulf between evidence-based medicine and alternative medicine may not be as wide as we think. And there is nothing to prevent our logical questioning of alternative treatments in which at first we can see no sense. People are beginning to protest that smart technology may be fine when we are sick, if and when we can avail ourselves of it, but that a little human sympathy goes a long way towards helping us face up to illness and its complications.