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Transcript: Ted Mala, M.D., M.P.H.

PTSD sufferers have not found comfort or solace except through traditional healing

[Mala:]
For people coming back from the military with this post-traumatic stress and so on, especially Native people, have not found any kind of solace or comfort except through traditional healing, and the VA is actually funding a Navajo medicine man to work with people in that classification, and they’ve been asking us how to help heal some of the trauma. Every day you hear the terrible stories of people stressed out and suicides and so on. If Western medicine was working so well—and I believe in Western medicine, but I believe in it being complementary—is working so well, then why is it a multibillion-dollar industry to help people look for something else?