Dr. Alvord incorporates Western medicine and Native American medicine

by Natalie Myers

Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord grew up in a small Navajo community in the northwest corner of New Mexico. It was a place so rural that people outside the town didn’t have running water.

"They lived with wood stoves and lanterns," she said. "So, very, very much similar to how they'd lived for a very long time."

In addition, it was a place where very few of the children went on to college after high school. Dr. Alvord said she didn't really plan to do a whole lot with her life, though she had been a very good student, the youngest in her class, and graduated high school at age 16.

She thought she would go into teaching, but instead she became inspired to attend Dartmouth University by a fellow Navajo who had been studying at an Ivy League school.

At Dartmouth Dr. Alvord took her first neuroscience class and enjoyed it so much that she decided to work at a neurobiology lab in New Mexico after graduation. From that experience she decided to go back to Dartmouth, take some pre-med classes,and start applying to medical schools.

She got into Stanford Medical School and, soon after, met a Navajo surgeon who inspired her to study surgery. And that's how Dr. Alvord became the first Navajo woman to be board certified in surgery.

Since achieving that milestone in 1994, Dr. Alvord has accomplished much more. She has raised awareness of Native American health. In2005, she led a significant study of 2,155 Native American and Native Alaskan patients, the largest of its kind to date.

The study concluded those patients have a greater chance of death within 30 days of surgery and suffer from more preoperative risks compared to White patients. And Dr. Alvord’s team is now working on phase two of that study.

"We're trying to understand why they have higher mortality rates," she said. "We're finding it's very difficult to sort out what's going on."

Dr. Alvord believes the problem could be linked to very distinct differences in ideology between Western medicine and Native American medicine. (To be clear, this is not a scientific discovery, it is a belief.)

After graduating cum laude from Dartmouth University and Stanford Medical School, training in surgery at Stanford University Hospital, serving as chief resident from 1990-1991 and then becoming general surgeon at an Indian health service medical center close to her home in New Mexico . . . Dr. Alvord decided to spend some time with one of the medicine men from her tribe.

He told her, ‘the mind is the foremost energy that we have and that ceremonies are done to purify the mind and if that happens then the body will heal.'

Since that time, Dr. Alvord has made it her job to incorporate Native American medicine and healing ideology into her private general practice. That means she allows Native American patients to have ceremonies directly before or after surgery and she allows sacred objects like eagle feathers and corn pollen bags in the operating room during surgery.

She also talks extensively with patients of all backgrounds, exploring what is impacting them mentally and emotionally because that will affect the surgery. She helps patients address those things beforehand.

"My belief is that patients will do better if they're calm and if they're in a state of mind that believes all will go well," she said. It also helps "if they have a strong connection to their surgeon and trust their surgeon and believe their surgeon will take care of them."

Dr. Alvord also believes when all of these things align it actually helps the surgery go smoother. Therefore, she says, she also seeks and creates the same level of trust and respect with her team in the operating room.

At first, Dr. Alvord thought this kind of practice would change the field of surgery, but soon she realized that would be too great a feat to conquer. So she wrote a book, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, and she speaks regularly about the topic as a way to spread the word about this gentler, more humanized approach to surgery.

"What I found when I give talks is many cultures from different backgrounds . . . middle east, far east, say their culture teaches similar things as well," she said. "It's like opening doors to the rest of the world."

Dr. Alvord hopes her story encourages our society to examine other cultures and be open to what these cultures have to offer to enhance the field of medicine.

She currently lives in New Hampshire with her husband, son, and daughter. Dr. Alvord is associate dean of student and multicultural affairs at Dartmouth Medical School and an active mentor of Native American and other students seeking careers in medicine.

Natalie Myers is a reporter for MarketingSherpa in Warren, where she writes best practice case studies and how to's for marketers. She formerly worked at Providence Business News for two years where she covered small business and the creative economy. She has won two awards, one for a Small Business Journalist of the Year award from the local Small Business Administration, and the other a Michael P. Metcalf Media award for a series on Latino entrepreneurs.

photo of Myers by Reza Corinne Clifton