‘Do no harm’: Native, mainstream medicine
Freshly minted McMaster med school graduates slipped on ceremonial short white coats, symbolizing their passage toward become doctors.
It felt, Amy Montour thought, like a secret society she had joined. And then a speaker celebrated them: You are the crème de la crème of society, he said.
Montour grew up on Six Nations; a high-school dropout who raised three kids while persevering through poverty and domestic violence.
“I was thinking: I bet he doesn’t know my story; I’m not the crème of anything . ... I stand above nobody. My knowledge and skills don’t make me better, but give me a responsibility to help others.”
Montour — Dr. Amy Montour — spoke Tuesday at Hamilton Convention Centre, the very building where six years ago she donned that white coat.
Montour spoke of how she practises mainstream, evidencebased medicine for which she
was trained, while remaining cognizant of Indigenous healing beliefs and culture.
Working to better blend those two worlds is one education goal of the Indigenous Health Practice and Research Conference, held over two days with about 20 speakers and 250 participants from native and non-native backgrounds across Canada.
That uneasy mix has caused controversy, for example, in court battles over whether Aboriginal children should be compelled to receive chemotherapy treatment for cancer, if they elect — along with their parents — to forgo it in favour of traditional medicine.
After her talk, Montour, who is a hospitalist and practises palliative care in Brantford, and makes house calls on Six Nations for the elderly and palliative care patients, told The Spectator decisions should be centred upon the wishes of the patient and family, so long as they make informed choices that are true to their beliefs.
“What the patient and her family choose is not for the physician to decide. Our job is to educate, inform, and support.”
She disagreed that the ancient Hippocratic Oath — “Do no harm” — is a moral precept found only in mainstream medicine and not Indigenous healing practices.
“I think ‘do no harm’ goes across both, absolutely, and that’s where we can find middle ground. … We want to see patients as a whole, it’s not just about their physical health.”
As if to underscore her point, the conference, the first of its kind in Canada, was sponsored in part by Hamilton Health Sciences and McMaster University Health Sciences.
But Bradley Johnson, who is a McMaster medical school graduate, family doctor in Simcoe, and who lives on Six Nations, said mainstream medical care and education remains largely “paternalistic.”
A dark, if relatively unknown historical example of this paternalism was described by speaker Maureen Lux: segregated health care symbolized by 22 “Indian hospitals” built in Canada starting in 1946.
Lux, a history professor at Brock University, wrote a book on the subject, titled “Separate Beds.”
Care in those hospitals was dangerously inferior to that in public hospitals, she suggested, and also lead to compulsory medical treatment using “Apprehension Orders.”
“Think about that: they criminalized ill health,” Lux said.
That combination of shoddy yet forced care still casts a shadow on the mainstream system for natives, said Pat Mandy, the conference chair, and board chair of the De Dwa Da Dehs Nye>s Aboriginal Health Centre in Hamilton — which she said was created 19 years ago for that very reason.
“Because of those (Native) hospitals, and residential schools, some don’t even want to go into a building that looks institutional, because it brings back memories.”