Do they really have to know what Shamanism is? Just go to the hospital, visit a stranger who is dying and "heal" them. Prove your craft.
Don't wait for patients to come to you - go to them. If I could do what you claim they would have to kick me out of the hospitals or anyplace with sick and ill people. I'd start by getting a team together and canvassing every children's hospital I could. The doctors and staff wouldn't even have to know what was happening! But when they see a patient that they expected to die "healing"....well, what could anybody say but thank you.
Or is it about money. Do your patients need to "believe in you and your craft" first?
Please - Help us western folks from ourselves....Please!
Get real. Many of the physicians who practice shamanism have to practice underground. One I met who does group work with cancer patients said he was trying to figure out how to introduce it into the hospital without getting kicked out. My teacher, a psychologist and medical anthropologist, said that he and some of his buddies were brought up before their professional organization years ago for practicing shamanism. Some though, like me, don't care what any organization has to think. However, it keeps you outside the doors to many institutions.
Yes, belief is important...with any type of treatment including allopathic.
I posted this on another thread but it goes here also:
"Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord bridges two worlds of medicinetraditional Navajo healing and conventional Western medicineto treat the whole patient. She provides culturally competent care to restore balance in her patients' lives and to speed their recovery.
As a Stanford-trained surgeon, she developed her technical and clinical skills. Alvord was the first Navajo woman to be board certified in surgery. But when she returned to the New Mexico reservation to work in a Navajo community she discovered, she says, that "although I was a good surgeon, I was not always a good healer. I went back to the healers of my tribe to learn what a surgical residency could not teach me. From them I have heard a resounding message: Everything in life is connected. Learn to understand the bonds between humans, spirit, and nature. Realize that our illness and our healing alike come from maintaining strong and healthy relationships in every aspect of our lives."
Surgery can remedy many ills, but as Alvord worked with her Navajo patients she learned that modern scientific medicine by itself could not reestablish the missing harmony in their health. Navajo healers (hataalii) use song, symbols (such as corn pollen, eagle feathers, masks of the Navajo gods, and sand paintings), and ceremony with their patients, and involve family and neighbors in the process. The psychological and spiritual comfort thus provided can prepare patients for surgery, childbirth, or chemotherapy, for example, and speed their recovery afterwards.
Dr. Alvord is still a surgeon, but she tries to heal, not just fix, her patients by working with families, other practitioners, and constant cultural awareness. She looks for the places in the patient's life, relationships (both personal and with health care providers), and environment where things are out of balance. "Hospitals need to have places where you can see trees and grass and sky and sun... animals nearby, and not just for children and the elderly. Beauty is so importantartwork on the walls, gardens, outdoor porches with a view. A hospital should also have the right smells, the right foods, the right sounds, the things in life that soothe us. We should also avoid the things that are wrong, that cause stressno harsh sounds, no bright lights, no invasive overhead paging."
In Alvord's New Mexico house, her two worlds sit side by side: a beeper on the table, a cell phone on its charger, and a stack of medical journals that share space with a handmade wood and leather cradleboard. A menagerie of bear fetishes inhabits the mantelpiece."
