When patients come to Lisa Dolchok, it's a little different than a typical doctor appointment. Instead of getting immediately to their ailment she talks with them for a while, about where they are from, about their grandparents, she examines how they sit. In her sessions she talks about god and spirituality, she encourages her patients to scream, laugh, cry, burp and fart.
Some of her patients come out of long stints in the prison system, others are paranoid schizophrenic or bi-polar. Many are in chronic pain.
But to Dolchok, a 71-year-old woman with grey bobbed hair and a quiet but somehow radiant manner, they are all "beautiful."
"I walk with them, I walk with every patient I see where they are. I don't judge and I believe what they tell me. Because I know eventually they will tell me the real stuff," Dolchok said.
Dolchok is one of the tribal doctors that staff Southcentral Foundation's Traditional Healing Clinic. Tribal doctors work within Southcentral Foundation on referral from doctors - even if Dolchok herself gets a treatment from a colleague, she said, it has to come with a referral. Dolchok uses healing touch in her practice, and the clinic also offers talking circles, blessings, purifications and other traditional healing methods.
Bu in addition to healing touch, Dolchok said lot of it her practice comes down to knowing patients well, continuing to know them over time, and learning where they've come from. For her work, "you have to know our culture, you have to be strong in it," Dolchok said.
Dolchok and other doctors and healers were recently singled out by Dr. Yvett Roubideaux, director of the Indian Health Service (IHS). Roubideaux presented a Director's Special Recognition Award for Public Health Leadership to Ileen Sylvester, Southcentral Foundation's vice president of executive and tribal services on June 29 in Washington, D.C.
The clinic's "fusion of native values, beliefs, and practices with modern medical practices is a prime example of the positive power of federal self-determination policies that allow Indian tribes to manage their own health care," said Dr. Roubideaux.
Sylvester said the "success of our traditional healing clinic is a testament to the spirit of collaboration between our tribal doctors and medical providers."
The clinic may be unorthodox from the perspective of western medicine. Dolchok said that she first learned to heal from her grandmother, and learned to practice healing touch because it was the closest she could come to a practice that is acknowledged in western medicine. Still, she said, "there's skepticism, even with our own people."
But the important thing is "here (at Southcentral) you have choices," she said.
"My elders said a long time ago - the minute you're borne, you're dying. So in between you'd better do something, you'd better make a life."