• Resident & Student News •
by J. Michael Brodie
 Lori Alvord, M.D. |
A young Navajo woman comes to the Gallup Indian Medical Center in Gallup, N.M., looking for Lori Alvord, M.D., the surgeon.
"My sisters won't eat my fry bread," the woman tells the surgeon. The woman has breast cancer, which in her community is something to be feared. She is shunned by the members of her tribe, by her own family.
But soon after her visit to the surgeon's office, the woman will take part in a night chant in which the tribal yei'ii, or dancers, don traditional garb -- that of the talking god, the clown and the hunchback. Through their surefooted steps and rhythmic chants, the dancers celebrate the beauty of earth and sky and call for the gifts of good health and nature's bounty.
The ceremony is important to the young woman. It clears her mind of all thoughts. It readies her for cancer surgery. It also readies Alvord for her role in that procedure.
"It matters that your environment is pure," said Alvord, who delivered the Stephen J. Jackson, M.D., Memorial Lecture at the AAFP National Conference of Family Practice Residents and Medical Students Aug. 8 in Kansas City, Mo. "The ceremony is a way to heal the healer as well. Words have an extraordinary power.
"One thing was certain after the surgery: No one would be afraid to eat Carolyn Yazi's fry bread anymore."
Alvord is the first Navajo woman to become a surgeon. She grew up on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico where she attended public schools that were 95 percent Navajo. One of the few students in her graduating class to attend college, she enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., later earning her medical degree from Stanford University in Stanford, Calif.
"I was raised with tribal people, and I didn't know what to expect from college," Alvord said. "I had to try to reconcile two cultures."
Her book, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, describes the healing practices of the Navajo people and the challenges Alvord faced on entering the realm of Western medicine. Her book comes at a time when alternative medicine is garnering attention, and many patients are turning from Western medicine -- with its pills, costly equipment and modern procedures -- to other forms of healing.
"It is ironic that the so-called primitive cultures are the ones making medical breakthroughs," said Alvord, now a practicing surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and associate dean of minority and student affairs at Dartmouth Medical School. She referred to a long-held Navajo belief in the power of words and the thoughts that propel them -- that both good and bad can be "spoken" into existence -- calling to mind biofeedback techniques that have been shown to boost immune system function.
Thought and spirit are integral parts of the Navajo healing process, as is an appreciation of the beauty inherent in all things. Illness, Alvord explained, results from being out of balance or harmony in any area of life. It is the healer's task to restore that harmony.
"I became a surgeon because I love the beauty of the human body," she said, "and I wanted to restore the beauty of that body."
To reach writer J. Michael Brodie, e-mail mbrodie@aafp.org.
FP Report is published by the
AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2003 by
American Academy of Family Physicians.