The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing

Despite the technological advances, modern medicine has lost its way. In a healthcare system created to help people, patients “feel removed and forgotten” (2). These feelings are partly due to medicine becoming a “one-way system” (2). Doctors talk at their patients, rather than listening to them and forging relationships with them. Medical procedures often don’t take cultural norms into account. To Lori, the solution that could help change the course of western medicine is to integrate it with a Navajo approach to healing. This approach examines the whole being—mind, body, and spirit—rather than just the body, and acknowledges that all of these elements connect. By practicing this type of medicine, physicians will be able to offer culturally competent care.

In the early chapters of Lori’s story, she illustrates how she received expert training as a surgeon to perform operations, but had received minimal training in how to communicate with her patients. The complications that arose in Evelyn’s surgery are a good example. Evelyn had been scared prior to going into surgery. Lori was not the doctor that she had built a relationship with. During Evelyn’s surgery, Lori and her nurse argued and both had become angry at the other. All of these negative elements played a role in the complications that arose both during and after the surgery.