Tribal traditions key to native health
In the wake of the U.S. conflict in Vietnam, Spero Manson was a young scientist researching post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms among young American Indian veterans. The tribe he worked with in the southwest United States insisted he consider tribal ceremonies when he conducted his research. What he found was striking.
Those who participated in tribal ceremonies before they went off to war were much less likely to experience post-traumatic stress than members of the same tribal community who were not part of such rituals, said Manson, a member of the Pembina band of Chippewa.
"The data was so solid," he said.
American Indian communities are culturally different than western society as a whole -- so improving the health of those communities requires specialized research and possibly different medical treatments, Manson said this week at the second annual summit on Native American health.
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Held by the Collaborative Research Center for American Indian Health at the Sanford Center in Bemidji, it brought together health researchers from across the upper Midwest to exchange ideas with band leaders.
American Indians struggle with a number of chronic illnesses, among them diabetes and heart disease.
Although that has prompted a lot of studies in Minnesota and the Dakotas, the research isn't always well coordinated. Researchers at Sanford Health aim to change that, armed with a $13.5 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Disparities.
Researchers are using the grant, received a year and a half ago, to found the center, which aims to help share knowledge and diminish overlap in tribal research and health studies.
The center will create a research structure, streamline data collection and give band members some control over the focus of health studies, said Jennifer Prasek, director of community initiatives at Sanford Health in Sioux Falls S.D.
"Maybe I'm conducting a study on diabetes in a Native American community and someone next door is conducting that same study but we're not talking," Prasek, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said at the summit.
Participants at the summit also discussed evidence that traditional medicine isn't always the best or the only approach to the health conditions that challenge some American Indians.
"There are a number of instances where I just don't think western science is equipped to deal with the challenges American Indians are facing," said Manson, a researcher and professor of public health at the University of Colorado.
With veterans returning from U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe historian Larry Aitken is seeing the same trend in Minnesota that Manson observed in the southwest decades ago.
Aitken said local band members come to him for traditional spiritual help at his house on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation after western medicine fails to help them.
"They come in with these symptoms and give me tobacco and say, 'I have to talk to you,'" he said, "They didn't have the protective coating put over them before they left."