Coyote Medicine Coyote Medicine [Paperback]

Hailed by Dr. Andrew Weil as a book “that must be brought to all who seek true health,”Coyote Medicineis an engaging and essential testament to the power of alternative healing and recovery methods that lie beyond the confines of Western medicine.

Inspired by his Cherokee grandmother's healing ceremonies, Lewis Mehl-Madrona enlightens readers to alternative paths to recovery and health.Coyote Medicineisn't about eschewing Western medicine when it's effective, but about finding other answers when medicine fails: for chronic sufferers, patients not responding to medication, or terminal cases that doctors have given up on. In the story of one doctor's remarkable initiation into alternative ways to spiritual and physical health,Coyote Medicineprovides the key to untapped healing methods available today.CHAPTER ONE

Why Are You Here?

I started medical school expecting to become a research scientist. While still in college, I had joined a professor in his efforts to study biological membranes using a then-new technique called magnetic resonance imaging (now referred to by its acronym, MRI). As a member of his research team, I was named as a co-author of a paper he published on the work, and I imagine my acceptance into Stanford in the early 1970s was based partly on my participation in this new line of research. Indeed, I soon found a professor in my new California home with whom I intended to continue these studies. What I never expected was to become a clinician, focused less on research than on seeing patients.

At Stanford I actually started clinical work immediately. I had pushed myself to finish high school before turning sixteen, and as an undergraduate at Indiana University I had persuaded professors to let me take medical and graduate school biochemistry courses. These gave me advanced standing when I entered Stanford at age eighteen. As long as I took a necessary pharmacology course col£%