“Something is missing.” It’s a thought that struck Dr. Daniele Behn Smith with a painful pang both when she was in medical school and when she was doing her first locum in Dawson City, Yukon, where she is now a permanent family physician.

Dr. Behn Smith is a young First Nations woman who recently started her career as a rural family physician, after having studied at McMaster University in Hamilton and completing residencies at the University of Ottawa and the University of Manitoba.

That nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, which took her years to understand, turned out to be borne of the abundance of “head” and relative lack of “heart” found in Western medicine.

Dr. Behn Smith first went to Dawson City for a locum in March 2006. It was then she fell in love with the area and its people, she says, and also when she heard that Vision TV was looking for a physician to head up a series called Medicine Woman, which involved combing the world to learn about indigenous healing.

“At that time, the hard part for me was having an intuitive understanding that a piece was missing in the conventional approach to health and healing—but not being able to label that. The most challenging thing was trying to effect healing when there was a disconnect between mind, body and spirit. I was trying to learn to be a healer but only focusing on one element.”

So, although Dr. Behn Smith “wasn’t thrilled with the part about being on TV,” she went ahead and tried out—and she got the part.

It’s a job that took her on a journey to six continents in six months, all the while exploring the world of traditional healing.

The 13-part series, which began airing in September, follows Dr. Behn Smith as she visits shamans, herbalists, mystics and others who preserve centuries-old traditions and practices foreign to most Western physicians.

Her voyage of discovery takes her from the fringes of the Arctic Circle to the ancient lands of the Incas and Mayans, to lost valleys in Asia, across South Pacific islands, through the jungles of South America and over the grasslands, the rolling green hills of Wales and arid deserts of Africa.

Dr. Daniele Behn Smith on location in Wales.

Aboriginal health poor
Dr. Behn Smith, who exudes a peacefulness and sense of gratitude at every turn, says she decided to become a family physician when she was just five years old. “I had a female family doctor and it was always a positive experience.”

“As I came into my teens and early 20s, I was looking into my aboriginal roots—and what it means to be Métis and Dene. I grew up in a non-aboriginal community in Winnipeg, but saw the status of aboriginal health was so poor. Their rates of illness parallel those in the Third World, and I thought, ‘That is atrocious.’ That really sparked my interest to go into medicine. I thought, ‘This is going to be my opportunity to affect change.’ ”

Looking back, Dr. Behn Smith now says that was her naiveté talking. “When I got into practice, I saw I probably wasn’t going to be able to effect change from this conventional framework, because the way it is structured is a very disempowering model for aboriginal people. Our root suffering and illness is borne of the fact that we have become so disconnected from our traditional ways. There is a psychosocial component to illness.”

Series highlights
Some of the highlights of the TV series for Dr. Behn Smith include:

• an encounter with the Welsh healers and scholars who preserve the knowledge of the medieval physicians of Myddfai;

• an initiation into the healing traditions of the San Bushmen, the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa;

• meeting with one of New Zealand’s venerable Maori keepers of sacred knowledge; and

• meeting a 90-year-old homeopath in Namibia.

“He had been a pharmacist and trained later in his career to study the native plants of Namibia, meeting with the tribal people and getting an understanding of how they use the plants and then coming up with this incredible reference book that has all the tribal names and Latin names,” Dr. Behn Smith explains.

“I asked him what he’d seen as the difference between traditional and conventional healing and he didn’t miss a beat. He said conventional healers heal with the head, while traditional healers heal with the heart. It was so powerful. A light bulb went on for me, and the discomfort and dissatisfaction I’d had in family practice became clear. I wasn’t listening to those intuitive heart feelings, and so much of what I was doing was head-based. I knew if I wanted to feel good about the work I was doing, I was going to have to bring those two together.”

Another encounter Dr. Behn Smith remembers well was with the chief of the Vedda tribe in Sri Lanka.

“He was remarkable. He’s the chief of 20,000 Vedda people and also their medicine man. They don’t write anything down, like(the formulations of)any of their medicines. He showed me these medicines they have for arthritis that have 28 different plants in them that all need to be harvested at a different stage, season and phases of the moon, etc. It struck me how I couldn’t have gone through my medical training without the benefits of textbooks and laptops and notes. . . . I look at these people who live entirely off the land—who have healed themselves from medicines from the land . . . and the Western world has the audacity to think of them as savage! How can you dismiss the knowledge and the wisdom these people hold and have managed to preserve without reading or writing?”

Dr. Behn Smith filming her TV series 'Medicine Woman".

Naturally, Dr. Behn Smith’s visit to her ancestral home, the Dene Reservation in Fort Nelson, B.C., guided by her father, Richard, was also a particularly memorable stop on the journey.

“Exploring my own roots for this series was such a gift,” she says. “Any time I go back to Fort Nelson with my father, it is very special. It really grounds and centres me and gives me the confidence to go forward and just know that no matter what, my family is going to support me, and so it was invaluable.”

Dr. Behn Smith says she believes that incorporating aspects of traditional healing into her practice will help her to deliver better care—especially to her aboriginal patients. However, she says, first and foremost she is a conventional family physician.

“I always respect the fact people are seeing me as an FP and that is my primary role,” she says. But, as an adjunct to conventional medicine, she might refer a patient to a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine or an herbalist.

When it comes to an illness such as diabetes, for example, which Dr. Behn Smith sees often among her aboriginal patients, she says she would never recommend they come off their Western medicines.

“But just the acknowledgement and awareness that there are other elements at play—body, mind and spirit—is important. What I do suggest is people seek out from their elders the way they dealt with illness traditionally. Like when I speak with my grandparents, I ask, ‘How did you deal with illness and stay healthy?’ They say, ‘We lived off the land, gave thanks for the moose we hunted and the berries we harvested.’

“I think that gratitude reinforced that connection to the land and to an energy that is greater than ourselves. Once people acknowledge that connection, there is so much healing to gain. Also, the pride and self-esteem to be able to honour our traditional ways has power and medicine you just don’t get from metformin or glyburide.”