Lewis Mehl-Madrona

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and trained in family medicine, psychiatry, and clinical psychology. He has been on the faculties of several medical schools, including the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine, and teaches in the clinical psychology program at Union Institute & University in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Mehl-Madrona has been studying traditional healing and healers since his early days and has written about their work and the process of healing. His primary focus has been on Cherokee and Lakota traditions, though he has also explored other Great Plains cultures and those of Northeastern North America.

Mehl-Madrona continues to work with aboriginal communities to develop uniquely aboriginal styles of healing and health care for use in those communities. He also works with people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia to explore healing through dialogue in community.

His goal is to bring the wisdom of indigenous peoples about healing into mainstream medicine and to transform medicine and psychology through this wisdom, coupled with more European-derived narrative traditions. His current interests are psychosis and its treatment within community and with nonpharmacological means, narrative approaches to chronic pain and its use in primary care, and further developing healing paradigms within a narrative/indigenous framework.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona is author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, a trilogy of books on what traditional native culture has to offer the modern world. He is also author of Narrative Medicine and Healing the Mind Through the Power of Story: The Promise of Narrative Psychiatry.