Is There a Shaman in the House?

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With only an eighth-grade education and a GED, Low Dog had far to go. But she was not without resources: She'd attained a third-degree black belt and won national tae kwon do championships, become an accomplished horsewoman who could leap to a stand on a moving horse, been apprenticed to a midwife in a Richmond, Virginia, ghetto, and accumulated a wealth of knowledge about herbs and how to use them medicinally.

Though Low Dog grew up on a Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where her father's mother was a midwife and his father a healer, she scoffs at the romantic 'noble savage' notion of herbal wisdom. She did study with a Paiute family who tended sheep in the Arizona desert, but she also learned from her Irish American grandmother in Kansas, her Korean martial arts instructors, a Jamaican midwife, and the dockworkers on the Chicahominy River where she fished, all of whom had their own herbal remedies.

And just as central to her role as healer, she says, was the legacy of tolerance she acquired from her Irish grandmother and Juba, the Jamaican midwife. She recalls how, when she criticized the behavior of their junkie, streetwalking clients in Richmond, Juba replied, 'Don't judge them. If they think we're judging them they won't invite us back. And if we're not there to help them, who will?'

That question haunted Low Dog later in Las Cruces when a Mexican man came to her with a very sick baby. She gave him herbs and money for Tylenol, but she told him he really needed to see a doctor and suggested a way to do it without being deported. Four days later he reappeared to thank her before returning to Mexico with his dead baby.

'I felt like the world just stopped at that moment,' she recalls. 'What if I could have done more? I'll always feel responsible for that baby's death.' That's when she decided to go to medical school.

Ironically, now that she is a doctor, her own practice has been truncated by her peripatetic speaking schedule. Living on two acres outside Albuquerque with her two children and herbalist husband, Low Dog sees patients one or two days a week, about 18 per day, while another doctor who practices complementary medicine covers the other days.

In her office, Low Dog efficiently blends her old and new wisdom. 'A woman can come here and talk about taking Saint-John's-wort or a natural hormone replacement while getting her Pap smear and having her cholesterol checked,' she says. 'If I need to use an anti-hypertension medication, I might also recommend coenzyme Q10, an exercise program, stress management techniques, and nutritional advice. It just takes an extra five to ten minutes, but it can make all the difference to your patient. We make a little less because we take a little more time for follow-up visits, but it all works out at the end of the day.'

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