Ecological Medicine by Kenny Ausubel

Author:Kenny Ausubel [Ausubel, Kenny; Harpignies, J. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781578051960
Publisher: Sierra Club Books

The Role of Herbs

in Integrative Medicine

Tieraona Low Dog

Dr. Tieraona (Ta-row-nay)Low Dog is a dazzling expression of the transformation under way in health care. Among the most dynamic and eloquent advocates of plant medicine, she serves as a member of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. As one of the country’s leading experts on botanical medicine and integrative approaches to health, she chairs the influential U.S. Pharmacopoeia Dietary Supplements—Botanicals Expert Committee, which evaluates the clinical evidence of commonly used herbs. She can rap biochemistry with the best of them.

But what makes her even more impressive is that she began her work as the Herb Lady of Las Cruces, New Mexico, with a three-week waiting list. “I didn’t go to medical school to become a doctor,” she says. “I saw myself as a doctor who did not have enough diagnostic capabilities or the knowledge/ability to have really powerful medicine when people needed it.”

She grew up on the Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota, where her father’s mother was a midwife and his father a healer. She studied with a Paiute family that tended sheep in the Arizona desert, and she also learned from her Irish-American grandmother in Kansas, a Jamaican midwife, and her Korean martial arts instructor (she has a third-degree black belt and has won national tae kwon do championships). She apprenticed as a midwife for more than five years and served as president of the American Herbalist Guild.

The Herb Lady’s turning point occurred in Las Cruces when a Mexican man came to her with a very sick baby. She gave him herbs and money for Tylenol but told him he really needed to see a doctor. Four days later he returned to thank her before going back to Mexico with his dead baby. “I felt like the world just stopped at that moment,” she recalls. “What if I could have done more? I’ll always feel responsible for that baby’s death.” That’s when she decided to go to medical school.

Go she did, despite having only an eighth-grade formal education and a general equivalency diploma, as well as being a single mom who was home-schooling her son. Today she serves as medical director for the Tree House Center of Integrative Medicine in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a family medicine practice treating women and children. She is assistant clinical professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and clinical lecturer for the Department of Medicine at the University of Arizona School of Medicine in Tucson. With her herbalist husband, she is designing continuing medical education learning modules on botanical medicine.

Tieraona was named by Time magazine as an Innovator in Alternative Medicine for 2001 and is a past recipient of the Martina de la Cruz Medal for her human rights work with indigenous people and remedies.

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