Indigenous Medicine

Nicole Redvers et al. (2020) · PloS one

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and much of the older literature was written by non-Indigenous observers whose framing the authors flag as sometimes outdated or inappropriate.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.