Holistic Healthcare: Recognizing traditional practices of the American Indian community

Abstract

The American Indian community has had traditional healing practices, herbs, and medicines to cure their people long before Western medicine dominated the landscape. This holistic approach to healthcare including these traditional practices and medicines were not included in what we see offered at Western clinics nor are they covered by health insurance companies in the United States. The purpose of this work was to personally observe to understand the marriage of traditional healing and spiritual care in a Western clinic setting. In order to increase the number of people being served in this holistic manner, I name a few recommendations including: adding traditional healing and/or spiritual care service components to other clinics and perhaps hospitals; creating a formal referral network for physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, and other healthcare providers to use; creating a database of available traditional healing and spiritual care services in a geographic area for community members and organizations to use; and expanding the post-event participant surveys to collect more identifiable information and potential barriers to service their participants face to better serve the community.