Traditional Indigenous medicine in North America: A scoping review.

The short version

This scoping review examined 249 published articles to map what is known about traditional Indigenous medicine as practiced across North America — the healing systems, ceremonies, and practitioners used by the region's approximately 7.5 million Indigenous peoples. Traditional Indigenous medicine treats a person as a whole being of body, mind, and spirit connected to family, community, and land, with healing understood as restoring "connectedness" through practices that may or may not involve a physical medicine in the Western sense. The review was built with an Indigenous Elder as co-author and content expert, deliberately using an Indigenous-led approach to synthesis rather than a purely Western critical-review method. Researchers searched six academic databases and multiple grey-literature sources from the earliest records through June 2020, screening thousands of records down to 249 included articles spanning 1888 to 2020. Ethnobotany and plant-physiology papers were excluded to keep the focus on practices and practitioners. The team sorted the literature into five themes — general traditional medicine, integration with Western medicine, ceremonial healing practices, usage patterns, and healer perspectives — without performing a formal quality assessment, a choice the authors describe as consistent with Indigenous research protocols rather than a gap. Three findings stand out. First, traditional-healer consultation rates varied widely by community, from about 17% to over 70% of people surveyed, and multiple studies found most patients never told their physician about this use. Second, within the 30 articles on ceremonial healing, a study of incarcerated adults given jail-based sweat lodge ceremonies for alcohol use disorder reported a 7% re-incarceration rate versus an estimated 30-40% for non-participants (interpret with caution: one program, not a controlled trial). Third, a 13-week "Indigenous Healing and Seeking Safety" program combining traditional and trauma-focused approaches cut trauma symptom scores by 55% (p=0.001) in a small pilot of 17 participants. The review's honest limitation is its own scope: it catalogues what has been published, it does not grade or verify the quality of any individual study, and much of the older literature was written by non-Indigenous observers whose framing the authors flag as sometimes outdated or inappropriate. For seekers and clinicians alike, the practical takeaway is that traditional Indigenous medicine is widely used, often undisclosed to conventional providers, and under-served by rigorous evaluation — a call for more research and better clinician-healer collaboration rather than a verdict on what works.

Key findings

• Traditional Indigenous medicine across North America is a whole-person healing system, treating body, mind, and spirit as connected to family, community, and the land, not just a collection of remedies.
• This review of 249 published articles found that how often people consult traditional healers varies widely by community, from about 17% to over 70% of people surveyed, and most patients never mention this use to their regular doctor.
• A jail-based sweat lodge ceremony program for alcohol use disorder was linked to a 7% re-incarceration rate versus an estimated 30-40% for non-participants in one study, though this was a single program, not a randomized trial.
• A small 13-week program combining Indigenous healing with trauma-focused therapy (Seeking Safety) reduced trauma symptom scores by 55% in 17 participants, a promising but very preliminary result.
• The review itself performed no quality grading of the studies it catalogued, so it should be read as a map of what has been published and studied, not as proof that any specific practice works.

Common questions