Healing Forward

Aaron Bia hoped that his path through medicine would eventually take him back home. When the day finally came, the good news spread quickly through Canyon de Chelly, Arizona: “There’s a Navajo doctor coming back.”  

For a remote tribal community with a unique set of health-care challenges and a proud history of traditional medicine, the chance to be treated by a Native doctor is at once important and rare.

“I get to be that provider who looks like and represents our community,” says Bia, who recently completed his residency at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah.

Located on the vast Navajo Nation, Canyon de Chelly is 230 miles from the nearest major city. Patients may drive hours for appointments or wait months for specialists to visit the reservation. Or, patients may prefer to rely on traditional healing. 

Growing up, Bia watched with awe as his grandfather, a traditional Native healer, would methodically uncover the cause of a medical problem. That might mean having a lengthy conversation with a family before determining a boy’s rash resulted from a local insect and prescribing an herbal remedy.  

“This was our health care system before modern medicine came to our tribal homelands,” Bia says. 

As a child, he dreamed of uniting his grandfather’s traditional approach with modern medicine. He gravitated to the U’s Family Medicine Residency Program because of its emphasis on tribal and rural health. As a guest instructor in the Tribal, Rural, and Urban Underserved Medical Education (TRUE) Program, he helped students learn to handle challenges like long emergency response times, spotty Internet service, and chronic conditions exacerbated by social determinants of health. 

“That was such a validating experience for me,” Bia says. “I knew I was in the right place.”

Back at home as a staff physician with the Indian Health Service, Bia talks of “hózhó,” or “balance in life.” 

“Now, my patients are my teachers,” he says. “I learn something new every time. I can offer them my medical school training recommendations, but I’ll leave the option for if they want to pursue traditional medicine.”

Read the full version of this story at University of Utah Health.