Lewis Mehl-Madrone MD
https://www.mehl-madrona.com/about
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and trained in family medicine, psychiatry, and clinical psychology. He completed his residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He has been on the faculties of several medical schools, most recently as associate professor of family medicine at the University of New England. He continues to work with aboriginal communities to develop uniquely aboriginal styles of healing and health care for use in those communities. He is interested in the relation of healing through dialogue in community and psychosis. He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, a trilogy of books on what Native culture has to offer the modern world. He has also written Narrative Medicine, Healing the Mind through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative Psychiatry, and, his most recent book with Barbara Mainguy, Remapping Your Mind: the Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story.Lewis currently teaches with the family medicine residency at Eastern Maine Medical Center (EMMC) in Bangor, where he does inpatient medicine, outpatient precepting, and obstetrics. He works in consultation-liaison psychiatry at EMMC and also at Acadia Hospital. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation. Lewis 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 upon Cherokee and Lakota traditions, though he has also explored other Plains Cultures and those of Northeastern North America. His goal is to bring the wisdom of indigenous peoples about healing back into mainstream medicine and to transform medicine and psychology through this wisdom coupled with more European derived narrative traditions. He has written scientific papers in these areas and continues to do research. He writes a weekly (almost) blog on health and mental health for www.futurehealth.org. His current interests center around psychosis and its treatment within community and with non-pharmacological means, narrative approaches to chronic pain and its use in primary care, and further developing healing paradigms within a narrative/indigenous framework.
Purpose
My focus arises out of a desire to celebrate indigenous culture, particularly that of North America, and to show how contemporary health care practices can be enriched through the inclusion of the ideas of indigenous culture into contemporary work. Thus, I will speak about traditional healing, about how psychotherapy and medicine can be modified to include the insights of traditional healing. I am interested in narrative medicine as a means for which storied indigenous practices enter contemporary medicine and psychology. I am interested in dialogical self theory and therapy as a contemporary parallel to the self-theory of indigenous cultures. I am interested in how we can train new doctors to be simultaneously humanistic, narrative, and evidence-based.