KAREN:  You just mentioned the interacting with the traditional healers, and that's actually one of the questions I have is how that worked with traditional healers and now more Western medicine coming in. 

WALTER:  Well, it -- there was never any big interchange because what -- what the Native healers were doing did not really come up with specific maneuvers or medications or practices that were compatible with allopathic traditional, or Western medicine, that had been subjected to our, you know, scientific criteria. 

Just as an example, when we were doing physical exams in Kotzebue, after I had done my little thing, why, then, I turned to Rose, who was Della's understudy then, and asked her if she would do her exam, which she, without hesitation, did because apparently part of the diagnosis and therapy that the traditional healer used was manipulation of internal organs. 
But there was no real meeting of the minds of, you know, what was being done and what was being accomplished. 

KAREN:  And people seemed willing to come to health aides in the clinics instead of relying on their traditional healers? 

WALTER:  I was never aware of -- of any real conflict where the local traditional healers felt seriously threatened. 

I can give one example where the traditional medicine was not very successful and the outcome was rather tragic. 

In about 1955, a patient came into the Bethel hospital with a severely infected boil, what it started out as a boil on his -- on his leg, from Nelson Island to the west of Bethel.  And by the time he reached us, he was very sick, generally. 
And there was this boil which had been opened and packed with feathers or down from a bird.  And this apparently resulted in a -- in a septicemia that the organism introduced, just went into the bloodstream. 

The result was that these clusters of organisms went into the circulation, and we observed that all of a sudden this person developed spots all over his body.  And was going into shock. 

At which point we referred the patient into Anchorage, which had a lot better and faster lab facilities to -- to track this down.  But it was too late.  The patient didn't survive -- did not survive. 

KAREN:  And so the use is that --

WALTER:  But I don't want to take that as an example to bad-mouth --

KAREN:  No, no. 

WALTER:  -- traditional medicine. 

The whole -- well, I'm not going to get into the whole issue of allopathic versus alternative medicine, but we all now, the journals frequently say that people in the United States in general are spending as much or more money on alternative medicine than traditional allopathic medicine.  So that -- that's a subject of common discussion now. 

KAREN:  Uh-hum.