Coyote Medicine: Lessons From Native American Healing »

Lewis Mehl-Madrona is a research assistant professor of family practice at the University of Arizona School of Medicine, where he is primarily affiliated with the Native American Research and Training Center. He received his M.D. from Stanford University in 1975 and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Psychological Studies Institute in Palo Alto in 1980. Dr. Mehl-Madrona has extensive clinical, teaching, and research experience. He has worked as an emergency room physician at hospitals in California, New Mexico, and Vermont, and as the medical director of the Center for Recovery from Illness in San Francisco. He has served as an associate professor at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine and as a research assistant professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine at the Universities of Arizona and Vermont. His research interests focus on mathematical computer modeling as a means of aiding clinical decision-making and improving treatment evaluation. He is a recipient of the 1993 Excellence in Research as a Family Practice Resident Award from the American Academy of Family Practice. Dr. Mehl-Madrona is currently helping to create a clinic and training program for the integration of Western and indigenous healing methods.

William L. Simon is a screen and television writer and bestselling author.

Inspired by his Cherokee grandmother's healing ceremonies, Lewis Mehl-Madrona enlightens readers to "alternative" paths to recovery and health. Coyote Medicine isn't about eschewing Western medicine when it's effective, but about finding other answers when medicine fails: for chronic sufferers, patients not responding to medication, or "terminal" cases that doctors have given up on. In the story of one doctor's remarkable initiation into alternative ways to spiritual and physical health, Coyote Medicine provides the key to untapped healing methods available today.

Publishers Weekly

"My own twin journeys through the worlds of medicine and the spirit" is how Mehl-Madrona describes this well-written, if uneven, account of his odyssey from the orthodox halls of Stanford Medical School in the early 1970s to his Cherokee-Lakota Sioux roots and on to a career in holistic medicine in the 1980s. While still a medical student on rotation, horrifying examples of incompetence and the power of ego-driven doctors to silence protest, plus their refusal to listen to pleas for change, prompted Mehl-Madrona to delve into his memories of the different healing methods practiced by his grandmother, a Cherokee, and to investigate the methods of other Native American healers. Soon, he was learning about sweat lodges, medicine men, shamans, peyote and curanderas, in addition to Western medical techniques. Predictably, Mehl-Madrona quickly ran into trouble with the medical establishment. Mehl-Madrona breaks little new ground here in this memoir, and his chronology is sometimes confusing. His descriptions of Native healing procedures are vivid and illuminating, however, as are his details of life in the medical profession. A worthy complement to the work of Larry Dossey and other forward-thinking physicians, this should appeal to students of Native American culture as well as to those interested in alternative healing. (Feb.)

Foreword by Andrew Weil, M.D.

Prologue

1. Why Are You Here?

2. Where Did You Come From?

3. Who Are You?

4. Healing Stories

5. Another Way

6. A Good Resident

7. The Sacred Fire

8. The Gift of the Sun

9. AIDS and the Spirit of an Illness

10. The Vision Quest

11. Coyote Medicine

Index