The Indian Health Service and Traditional Indian Medicine

Copyright

2009

This article discusses the federal government’s assumption of responsibility for American Indian health care brought together two fundamentally different systems: centuries-old traditional Indian medicine and modern Western medicine. Early physicians, while acknowledging extensive Indian use of herbal remedies and certain successful therapeutic procedures, generally regarded Indian healing as based primarily on superstition. Systematic attention to Indian medicine may be considered to have begun in the mid-20th century with two simultaneous occurrences: (1) the Many Farms Demonstration Project and (2) the 1955 transfer of Indian health services from the Department of Interior to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.