The best surgeons didn't operate on gallbladders or spleens or hearts, they operated on the people who owned them. People with children, jobs, interests, and beliefs. They operated on lives.

Odd things occurred almost daily. I decided simply to relax and be open.

In the Western world…disease is very compartmentalized by organs or medical specialties, and in some ways this does not benefit the patient. Specialists often don’t look outside their own parameters to see what else might be influencing an illness. A Navajo healer…will look at the person’s whole life and the lives of those around him or her…The Navajo view is a macro view, whereas Western medicine often takes a micro view.

Navajos believe in hozho or hozhoni – “Walking in Beauty” – a worldview in which everything in life is connected and influences everything else…So Navajos make every effort to live in harmony and balance with everyone and everything else. Their belief system sees sickness as a result of things falling out of balance, of losing one’s way on the path of beauty. In this belief system, religion and medicine are one and the same.

New technologies, like biofeedback, were helping us understand that the mind can indeed control the body. New research has even shown that the mind is able to positively or negatively influence the immune system, and our body’s ability to fight against cancers and infections. Medicine men were capable of working through channels that we in Western medicine did not yet understand.