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Doctor Brings 'Coyote Wisdom' to Town

Posted on: Monday, 16 May 2005, 12:00 CDT

Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona is very clear about the shortcomings of modern Western medicine.

"The medical model is great if you're in florid congestive heart failure and you are dying. It's a wonderful model; it works," he said.

"Once you're out of congestive heart failure, it doesn't work so well because it doesn't explore all the factors that are needed to prevent that next episode from happening sooner than later."

Mehl-Madrona, who practiced emergency medicine in rural and urban settings for nearly 30 years, said he enjoyed "resuscitating people and saving their lives, so to speak," but he noticed that the same people showed up in the ER, over and over again, in congestive heart failure or diabetic coma or other life-threatening conditions -- and eventually they died.

Mehl-Madrona believes what could help people with chronic or acute physical or mental ailments truly heal -- rather than just relieve their symptoms temporarily or pull them out of crisis -- is accessible through the techniques of indigenous healing traditions.

Mehl-Madrona is board-certified in family medicine, geriatrics and psychiatry and holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. He began visiting American Indian healers in Northern California while he was still a student at Stanford Medical School.

"I wasn't opposed to what I was learning," he said. "I just thought it was incomplete."

Mehl-Madrona comes to his interest in indigenous healing naturally. His own heritage includes Cherokee and Lakota healers and storytellers. But he wasn't really aware of the richness of his culture until he got to medical school.

"What really struck me (at medical school) was the absence of healing, the complete biological genetic determinism that wasn't at all what I grew up with," he said. "I grew up in a world in which spiritual powers healed people and people got better by virtue of their own actions in the world, or the spirits' actions."

So Mehl-Madrona, whose academic and intellectual credentials could have qualified him for a high-profile, high-income practice and academic position anywhere in the country -- he graduated from Stanford Medical School at the age of 21 -- devoted his career to integrating what he calls "Western and indigenous science."

"And I rediscovered a culture of healing," he said.

Having served on the faculties of five universities, Mehl- Madrona is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Arizona. But he will be leaving Tucson at the end of June to take a position in family medicine at Canada's University of Saskatchewan Medical School.

"I think that family medicine has historically been more community-based," he said, "and that's especially true in Canada. And I think that my interest in medicine is to explore what we can do in community."

Community, storytelling and ceremony figure prominently in Mehl- Madrona's approach to healing -- an approach he's presented in workshops for health-care professionals, spiritual retreats for people suffering from physical or mental illnesses, and documented in books for the general public.

Mehl-Madrona has written three books about his work. The first, Coyote Medicine: Lessons from Native American Healing, published in 1997, is still in print. In it, he tells his own story, taking readers through his medical training and early explorations of American Indian healing practices. The second, Coyote Healing: Miracles in Native Medicine, focused on elements common to healing stories and the people who use them to improve their well-being.

His third book, Coyote Wisdom: The Power of Story in Healing, released this month, shares stories he tells to inspire people to believe that healing is possible.

Each chapter demonstrates how he has blended his training in conventional medicine with American Indian and other indigenous practices in an approach he calls narrative psychology.

In Chapter 2, Stealing Fire, for example, a 50-year-old woman with a longtime diagnosis of bipolar disorder -- conventionally treated with medication and frequent hospitalizations -- learns how to "steal back her own mind" from a carefully crafted variation of the story of how Coyote and Bear stole the sun.

"Ursula reclaimed her mind from mania," Mehl-Madrona writes, "but had to struggle with the uncomfortable emotions that mania helped her avoid." Stealing-fire stories, he says in the book, are the ones he uses most often as a metaphor for a person's active efforts to reclaim lost health.

Rather than offer her drugs to help her through the painful transition period, Mehl-Madrona suggested Ursula watch The Wizard of Oz every day for one month. "She did and discovered that Dorothy had a choice at each moment of her journey," he writes in Coyote Wisdom. "Ursula discovered that she had a choice, too." At the time he wrote the chapter, he says, she had been off all drugs and avoided all hospitalizations for three years -- an unpredictable and unexpected result in a conventional therapeutic environment.

The book offers numerous examples of physical healing, too -- people recovering from ovarian and other cancers, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. But Mehl-Madrona doesn't hesitate to share stories of patients who die, too -- something many medical practitioners might consider a failure on their part.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for healing in Mehl-Madrona's work, a significant part of narrative psychology.

"It's a way of thinking that opposes the expert paradigm that other people know best," he said. "The power of the story paradigm - - or the narrative paradigm -- is that it says, 'Look, everyone's making up a story about what they think is going on and nobody has a privileged position to claim that their story is better than your story.' "

His goal is to tell healing stories and to teach people who are telling sickness stories to sing a different tune, he said.

"Stories begin the healing process," he writes in Coyote Wisdom, "stories inspire us to believe that we can heal. Then, through our identification with and incorporation of characters in the story, we 'drink in' the hidden wisdom they offer, a wisdom that cannot be articulated."

Mehl-Madrona will be in Santa Fe on Friday to lead an eight-hour workshop about the underlying philosophies of American Indian healing and traditional Western medicine and how the two cultures may be integrated to improve outcomes and heal lives.

He wants to expose participants, he said, to the richness of indigenous culture and a new way of thinking about health, illness and healing.

Unlike conventional biomedicine, he said, in which the problem is always referent to biology or genetics, the narrative movement says there's nothing wrong with a person's physical hardware. It's the software that we need to work on.

"If you're suffering," he said, "maybe it's not that you're defective -- that you're genetically marred. Maybe you're just living a story that doesn't work for you."

Phyllis Montgomery, executive director of the Santa Fe Forum, one of the sponsors of Friday's program, said Mehl-Madrona's workshop was to be offered to Santa Fe Indian Hospital staff only. But interest from others she told about it convinced her to open enrollment to the general public as well.

The original mission of the forum, Montgomery said, was to bring healers of diverse backgrounds to speak in Santa Fe. Since 1998, however, the forum, which is a public charity, has devoted all its work and resources to the Santa Fe Indian Hospital, supporting capital improvements in the building and "nourishing the spirits of staff and patients."

Montgomery has wanted to bring Mehl-Madrona to Santa Fe since she first heard him speak in 1997. She saw his gifts as a healer then, she said, and the "incredible quality of his attention." When someone in the audience asks a question, "it's as if there's no one else there," she said.

Mehl-Madrona has been in the vanguard of those merging conventional and alternative medicine, she said, and she believes New Mexicans are ready to hear his message.

(Sidebar)

If you go ...

Coyote Wisdom: The Power of Story in Healing A workshop with Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph. D., CEU and CME credits are offered When: Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: Tipton Hall, College of Santa Fe, 1600 St. Michael's Drive

Fee: $95, including box lunch To register: Call 471-0357 or

982-0982 by 5 p.m., today.

For more information: Visit www.coyotehealing.info/. Call (520) 307-0532 until June 30, or send an e-mail to mehlmadrona@aol.com.

Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

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