The healthcare provider and a three-step approach to
patients using aboriginal medicine
Amid such a background including tensions between practitioners and
between practitioners and patients, this chapter suggests practical guidelines
for approaching usage by or questions from patients about aboriginal ways.
A three-step strategy is offered. By using general approaches to patients’
questions and practices (covering herbal medicines and magico-religious or
spiritual approaches), this also focuses on the importance of reflecting on
conventional medical thinking and attitudes. Although accounts of aborig-
inal (and other traditional) practices directed at conventional healthcare
providers invariably concentrate on belief systems, the premise of this
chapter is that effective communication in our increasingly complex multicul-
tural communities also demands an awareness of how conventional thinking
shapes professional attitudes to ‘unproven’ therapies.
Gathering and processing information and responding non-judgementally
to patients’ questions about aboriginal use is not easy for a number of
reasons. One could even be a practitioner’s recognition that he or she is being
compared with a traditional healer whom the patient is visiting for the same
problem. Hence, the three-step strategy is offered to facilitate a working
approach and effective communication, an approach that applies to
traditional medicine in general and to CAM.
A three-step approach
Step 1
Step 1 is preparation (background education). To be able to respond to
aboriginal practices, conventional healthcare providers need not only to
understand belief systems, social circumstances and attitudes (perhaps
including uncertain trust in conventional practitioners), but also, as indi-
cated, to appreciate the factors that can shape professional attitudes toward
non-conventional treatments. As the latter is more for formal education
(undergraduate, continuing professional, etc.), some readers may feel that it
is out of place to notice even briefly some of the factors in this chapter.
However, mention is made of the importance of reflecting on, for example,
topics from EBM to the historical background of herbs and placebo actions
as a reminder that they are often overlooked as aids to effective communi-
cation. Moreover, having the relevant knowledge is important when negoti-
ating different viewpoints between practitioner and patient.
An appreciation of the history and concepts of self-care is also of use,
e.g. after European colonisation in the seventeenth century, aboriginal
people faced new information from the home and professional medicine of
46 |Traditional medicine