Lewis Mehl-Madrona - Coyote Healing: Miracles in Native Medicine

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Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D., is certified in family practice, geriatrics, and psychiatry and worked for years in rural emergency medicine. He is the author of Healing the Mind Through the Power of Story, Narrative Medicine, Coyote Healing, Coyote Wisdom, and the bestselling Coyote Medicine. He lives in Rochester, NY.

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Copyright 2003 by Lewis Mehl-Madrona

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mehl-Madrona, Lewis, 1954
Coyote healing : miracles in native medicine / Lewis Mehl-Madrona.
p.; cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
print ISBN 1-59143-010-0
ebook ISBN 978-1-59143-876-2
1. Mental healing. 2. Spiritual healing. 3. Indians of North
AmericaMedicine. 4. Miracles.
[DNLM: 1. Mental HealingUnited States. 2. Faith HealingUnited States. 3. Indians, North AmericanUnited States. WB 880 M498c 2002] I.Title.

RZ400.M443 2002
615.88208997dc21

2002154925

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Morgaine and Takoda, who have put up with
me for the past eleven years.

C OYOTE

Trickster, clown, jester, artist, friend, bringer of chaos and fun, teaching us to let go and laugh and, like the Hopi clowns, teaching us how silly we look to the gods when we take ourselves too seriously

Coyote has been my guide for years. Our animal helpers choose us more than we choose them. Ive always been drawn to coyotes, and they to me. I wanted a wolf, eagle, or bear as my muse, but I got Coyote instead.

Coyote has taught me the wisdom of making people laugh, of helping people to take themselves and their painful situations less seriously as a precursor to healing. I work like Coyote. I give people experiences that challenge their usual worldview. I introduce constructive chaos, trusting the inner healer in all my patients to reorganize perceptions and beliefs toward a state of greater healing. I teach people to welcome the unexpected, learning flexibility and resiliency.

This is the essence of Coyotethe only animal whose territory and range have spread despite encroaching civilization. Coyote is a survivor, as we all hope to be.

Since the dawn of science four centuries ago, the idea of miracles has made thoughtful people uneasy. Following the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, one of the badges of intellectual courage was to dismiss miracles and to consider those who believed in them as traitors to reason. Crush the infamy, Voltaire railed in eighteenth-century France, referring to claims of miraculous healings.

In keeping with this trend, the concept of the miraculous has fallen on hard times in medicine these days. Hard-core materialists, who have the upper hand in the healing professions, believe the idea of a miracle is absurd. They are convinced that all events in nature are dictated by the so-called ironclad laws of nature, which, they claim, cannot be breached: because miracles require a temporary suspension of natural law, by definition they cannot exist. Other individuals, however, suggest that since our knowledge of natures laws is incomplete, we should be cautious in declaring what can and cannot happen. Another view is that everything is a miracle. As David Ben-Gurion puts it, In order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.

Can miracles happen? Sir William Osler, who is regarded as the father of modern Western medicine, said, Literature is full of examples of remarkable cures through the influence of the imagination, which is only an active phase of faith. Phenomenal, even what could be called miraculous, cures are not very uncommon. Like others, I have had cases any one of which, under suitable conditions, could have been worthy of a shrine or made the germ of a pilgrimage. Osler knew that events do happen that defy all odds, and they occur totally out of the blue, stimulating a sense of awe and a connection with a transcendent something that is immensely greater and wiser than us.

What do so-called miracle cures look like? Lets look at some examples.

In 1962 Vittorio Michelli, a middle-aged Italian man, was admitted to the Military Hospital of Verona, Italy, suffering from a large, excruciatingly painful mass in the left buttock that was so extensive it limited the range of motion in the hip. X rays revealed extensive destruction of the bones of the pelvis and hip joint. A biopsy taken in May showed a fusiform cell carcinoma. As he was beyond hope of surgery, Michelli was immobilized in a plaster cast and was sent to a regional center for radiotherapy. Four days later, however, he was discharged without receiving any irradiation, and was admitted to the Military Hospital at Trente. He spent the next ten months there without any treatmentin spite of ongoing destruction of bone from the tumor, progressive loss of all active movement of the left lower limb, and progressive physical deterioration. By this time Michelli was literally falling apart, with the mass continuing to enlarge and eating away the bone and supporting structures that kept his left leg attached to the rest of his body.

On May 24, 1963, approximately a year after Michellis original diagnosis, he was taken, emaciated and unable to eat, by friends to Lourdes. It must have been a difficult journey with Michelli in his plaster cast. On arrival his friends bathed him in the holy waters. Following his holy bath, Michelli reported sensations of heat moving through his body, as well as an immediate return of his appetite and a resurgence of energy. His friends then transported him back to the hospital in Trente, still in plaster, where he began to gain weight and become much more active. A month later his doctors finally consented to remove his cast and take another X ray. They found that the tumor was smaller than before. It continued to diminish, and then it disappeared. Subsequent X rays tracked an astonishing event: The destroyed bone began to regrow and completely reconstruct itself. Two months after his trip to Lourdes, Vittorio Michelli went for a walk. His doctors said: