As a helping professional serving a culturally diverse population, how open would you be to incorporating the assistance and expertise of traditional healers from a culture with whom you are unfamiliar? I would be open to inviting more traditional and possibly healers from “Eastern” medicine into the clinical environment. Unfortunately, even if lightning struck and it was going to happen tomorrow, there are numerous hurdles, which our text spells out, to consider.
In a typical traditionally healing paradigm, accountability is not on a pill, or the patient being treated, but on the healer involved. This would cause tremendous friction on modern medicine since results are mostly subjective, and not quantifiable. In our text, Diller (pp.95, 2011) states that “Just because providers have certain racial or cultural roots does not guarantee their cultural competence or ability to work effectively with clients from their group of origin.” I have seen a Spanish speaking patient's eyes light up when an interpreter enters the room and have wondered if more involvement of somebody with familiar culture/heritage would make an unpleasant hospital stay much more tolerable.
I do not have the vision or a crystal ball to see how a traditional healer and a modern Cardiothoracic surgeon would collaborate or clash on treating the same patient, but from my clinical experience thus far, that discussion might be a little heated!

2. Some fears and cautions I might have would be are again echoed in our text, Diller (pp95, 2011) “Western healing stresses cause and effect, traditional appoaches emphasize circularity and multidimensional sources in etiology.” It it much simpler to observe a patients blood pressure at noon, give them a blood pressure pill, and observe a measureable difference thirty minutes later. The same cannot be said for a Shaman performing a ritual to cure a