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American Indians fitting into Medical School

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2016

Apanakhi Buckley
Apanakhi Buckley*
Affiliation:
Seattle, Washington State, USA
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Extract

This paper describes a qualitative study of how indigenous people experience medical school in the United States. Nine American Indians and Alaska Natives participated in the study: five women and four men. They came from eight different tribes, but they have asked me to protect their confidentiality, so I will not identify their tribes. Their ages ranged from 27 to 39. Five of them had children. Two of them were unmarried.

In the United States, the need for indigenous physicians is great. Twice as many American Indians die from homicide and suicide as non-Indians in the United States (Wallace, Kirk, Houston, Amnest, and Emrich, 1993); three times as many die from accidents and more than four times as many die from alcoholism (Indian Health Service, 1996). Diabetes is rampant among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Women are the hardest hit (Gilliland, Gilliland, and Carter; 1997). More than five times as many American Indian and Alaska Native women die from diabetes than non-Latina white women.

Type
Section A: International
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , December 1999 , pp. 5 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 1999

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References

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