| The Scalpel and the Silver Bear |  | Author: Lori Arviso Alvord
Publisher: Bantam Books
Category: Book
Buy Used: $49.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 4089740
Edition: Bantam trade pbk. ed
Pages: 204
ASIN: B0006RIALS
Publication Date: 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Publisher: Bantam BooksDate of Publication: 2000Binding: Soft CoverCondition: Very Good
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In a remarkable book that takes the reader on a spellbinding journey between two worlds, surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord describes her struggles to bring modern medicine to the Navajo reservation in Gallup, New Mexico—and to bring the values of her people to a medical care system in danger of losing its heart.
Finding the solutions to modern medicine's most daunting problems was far from the mind of a girl from a small, dusty town on a Navajo reservation. But Lori Arviso Alvord would leave the traditional hogans of her people to attend the prestigious Stanford University Medical School and become the first Navajo woman surgeon. Only after conquering the high-tech realm of the operating room would this extraordinarily talented doctor realize something was missing from contemporary medical care—an understanding of the whole person who has come seeking healing.
The Scalpel and the Silver Bear tells of Dr. Alvord's pioneering journey to become a woman surgeon, fighting the odds presented by her own culture and the unspoken rules that made surgery the territory of a privileged class of males. Then, having accomplished her dreams, the strong-willed young woman would find herself faced with a different challenge: learning another approach to medicine amid the Hataali, the medicine men of the Diné, the people we call Navajo.
Here in this moving, enlightening, and provocative volume, Dr. Alvord teaches us how she merged the latest breakthroughs of science and methodology with the ancient tribal paths to recovery and wellness. In dramatic encounters while practicing reservation medicine—a man whose intestine was pierced by a porcupine quill, which he insisted was placed there by an enemy's curse; a woman who had been struck by lightning and blamed her cancer on it; an all-night winter sing for a gravely ill young woman, attended by the whole community—Dr. Alvord witnessed the power of belief to influence health, for good or for ill. She discovered that patients undergoing chemotherapy did better after having a native healer at bedside, and that the feelings of both the patient and the surgeon could affect recovery time, postsurgical complications, and even whether the patient lived or died.
The secret, Lori Alvord discovered, lay in the Navajo philosophy of a balanced and harmonious life, called "Walking in Beauty." Her sharing of these ancient principles promises to have an immeasurable impact on today's doctors and patients by expanding the concept of mind-body healing to include the interconnectedness of all life. Personal, simply written, yet profoundly wise, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear joins those few rare works, such as Healing and the Mind, whose ideas have changed medical practices and our understanding of the world.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 "We have forgotten some of the things that heal us best" March 13, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Lori Arviso Alvord walks in two worlds. Raised on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico -- "the rez" -- she is the daughter of a Navajo man and a white woman. Carrying this dichotomy into her education and career, she went from the reservation high school to Dartmouth College, then found her path to Stanford University School of Medicine and a surgical residency in New Mexico.
As the first Navajo woman surgeon, she learned to integrate the science-based world of medicine and the spirit-based Native American culture. The importance of the singing cures, native healing practices, and other spiritual traditions was brought home to her when she observed her patients' outcomes. Surgical skill was often not enough when delivered without respect for the language, culture and spirituality of the Navajo patients.
The main focus of this memoir is Dr. Alvord's path to acceptance of the first Navajo principles: balance, harmony and wholeness, known as "Walking in Beauty." Along the way we learn a great deal about Native American history and culture, sensitively presented.
Dr. Alvord speaks of the cultural bases for Native American alcoholism and the prevalence of gang culture, monumental threats to the health and well-being of her people. The healing of these ills will never be achieved in the operating room alone, and many patients' stories illustrate this lesson effectively.
The outcome of Dr. Alvord's journey is signaled from the beginning, as is often the case with a memoir. While this may dilute the dramatic tension of her story, we're rewarded with a thoughtful and inspiring look at one woman's life and work, in all its contexts. I recommend this book to readers young and old who have an interest in the cultural aspects of medical care.
Linda Bulger, 2008
A thoughtful exploration of Indian culture and medicine July 26, 2007
Daughter of a full-blooded Navajo father and white mother, Lori Arviso Alvord grew up on a New Mexico reservation in a family that took pride in its native heritage, but followed few of the traditional ways. She attended Navajo schools but never learned the language; she knew her clan relationships and enjoyed the security of tribal connections but seldom attended ceremonies or understood the depth of meaning in the Navajo concept "Walk In Beauty."
Such a person might expect to shed the remnants of tribal culture on leaving the reservation to become a high-powered surgeon, a career that by its very nature flies in the face of Navajo precepts like privacy and self-effacement.
Indeed, throughout her memoir, co-authored by Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt, Alvord seems to straddle two worlds separated by an uncomfortable gulf. She first looked upon the deepness of that gulf at Dartmouth.
"For a girl who had never been far from Crownpoint, New Mexico, the green felt incredibly juicy, lush, beautiful and threatening." Unable to see the horizon, she felt claustrophobic. But the culture shock was worse. "I thought people talked too much, laughed too loud, asked too many personal questions, and had no respect for privacy." Navajos do not put themselves forward and cooperation is valued over competition. Not a good prescription for success at an Ivy League school.
At Dartmouth she began to feel her tribal identity more strongly and wonder if a kinaalda ceremony (a celebration of womanhood) would have helped empower her in such alien surroundings. But not until after medical school at Stanford, where she was forced to break numerous taboos (Navajo never touch the dead, for instance) and joined a profession where it is essential to ask prying, intimate questions and invade another's personal space at will, did Alvord really begin to explore the philosophical grounding of Navajo culture.
Becoming a surgeon at the Gallup Indian Medical Center, close to the reservation, Alvord notices that her patients do better when they are calm and relaxed, that harmony - even in the operating room when the patient is unconscious - is important for recovery.
She grows more interested in the Navajo philosophy that "everything in life is connected and influences everything else." To "Walk in Beauty" a person strives to live in balance, symmetry and harmony with everything and everyone else.
While this is an ancient precept, held in common with many other cultures and enjoying something of a renaissance in American medicine today, Alvord comes up with a particularly striking example. One of her surgery patients, a young woman, was the first to die of a strange illness that swept through the Navajo nation, killing 11.
A doctor working for the Centers for Disease Control, Ben Muneta, visited a medicine man, a hataalii, who told him "the illness was caused by an excess of rainfall, which had caused the pinon trees to bear too much fruit." There was "a significant deviation from the natural harmony of the world."
The medicine man showed a sand painting of a mouse and said that twice before in years of excess rainfall a similar disease had struck. " `Look to the mouse,' " he said. Weeks later the CDC determined that the Hantavirus was contracted from the droppings of infected deer mice. The deer mouse population had surged due to an excess of pinon nuts. "It was the rain."
Alvord's tone is quiet, reserved. It does not seem easy for her to describe the alcoholism of her charming father or the difficulties and generosity of her (married at 16) mother. Though she takes us to a nightlong ceremony for the sick and celebrates the strength her patients draw from medicine-man visits, she never explains why it takes her so long to visit a hitaalii during her own pregnancy. Or why she never approaches a medicine man to discuss cross-cultural treatments despite her growing conviction of the efficacy of the "whole body" approach.
While most of the book concentrates on her work and her struggle to reconcile cultures, she provides a wide, sad look at reservation life, beset by poverty and "white mans'" diseases. The long grief of history resides in the alcoholism and the self-loathing of so many - a balance that can never be put right.
At last Alvord leaves. Seeing it as the next natural step in her own "life trail", she returns to Dartmouth as a surgeon and a dean of minority and student affairs. At Dartmouth, she hopes, she can teach the Navajo "Walk In Beauty" principles to new doctors as well as working within the established system to bring better care to her own people.
The First Navajo Woman Surgeon. April 9, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am full-blooded Navajo, I was taught to believe in my traditonal ways and it disappoints me that she has talked about very scared ceremonies.
Solid credentials but too abstract December 4, 2003
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
--Dr Alvord writes about her journeys as a Native American student and physician. The book seems clearly designed for non-technical readers rather than the professional medical community, and there's little medical jargon. She uses her own difficult pregnancy and the death of a beloved grandmother as case studies in integrating Western medicine and Navajo ideas.
--On the one hand, it's worth reading this book just to hear such an inspirational story from such a role model. Dr Alvord tells her story with dignity and courage and she has many good ideas about listening to patients and integrating Balance and Harmony in our profession (although these ideas don't seem as radical or as rare within the medical community as she seems to imply, and I don't think she does anyone a great service by implying they are).
--On the other hand, the authors remained disappointingly abstract, even given the limitations of confidentiality and space. The stories of Navajo healing barely scratched the surface and the book was pretty scanty with practical advice that would help non-Native healers understand Native American patients. I'd love to have heard her perspectives on the magnitude of Native American health problems, how she handled the constant pressures of time and funding, or how she successfully used traditional Native American methods to help manage serious medical-social problems (i.e. alcohol use, diabetogenic diets, family pressures, basic compliance and responsibility issues, etc). In short, I'd like to have heard more about her successes.
--The book's perspective gives a good counterpoint to those who criticize Western medicine as too impersonal/sterile/uncaring/whatever, while they fail to demonstrate how to predictably improve things and still efficiently deliver technically competent health care to people with different levels of motivation and understanding. Western medicine works beautifully in its own niche, but it will be made to work less efficiently if we mess around with the wrong things. Perhaps medicine will improve if we balance the responsibilities of patients to live a healthy lifestyle with the responsibilities of healers to carefully listen to patients and then help them heal.
--This book did not practically help me to do this, so I cannot give it five stars despite my respect for her credentials. I do look forward to a sequel.
--Other books which may be of interest include Blessings (by Dr. A. Organick), The Dancing Healers, and Primary Care of Native American Patients.
READ THIS BOOK May 10, 2003
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I picked up this book and I could NOT put it down. What a wonderful journey described here....how she interlocks traditional medicine with Navajo, how harmony and positive spirit is such a process in the healing world. You will not be disappointed with this read. I have shared this with all those close to me. Make it part of your list
|
|
|
Copyright © 2005 - 2008 xtropo
Amazon.com Associate | |
