Dr. Walt Hollow:
A Pioneer on the Frontlines of Native American Medicine

Hollow is concerned however, that there may not be enough doctors in the pipeline to serve medical needs in the Indian community in the years to come. In addition, the turnover in doctors working among Native populations is extremely high. One of the things needed, he says, is for more medical schools to provide specialized training in Indian health, especially for Native American doctors.

"In any given year," he says, "at least for the past ten years, there have been four hundred Indians in one of 157 medical schools across the country, OK? You don't graduate four hundred in a year. There's probably a class of a hundred in first year, a hundred in second, a hundred in third, and a hundred in fourth. So we graduate a hundred Indian physicians every year as a general rule. Now, if that Indian has participated in a medical school that teaches nothing about Indian health problems, they probably aren't going to lean towards providing care to Indian people."

In 1999, Hollow did a survey of medical schools across the country to see what kind of training in Indian health care these schools offered. He looked up every medical school that had a Native American in it.

"I found thirty-five schools that had at least five Indians in their medical school," he says. "I called the dean of curriculum of each of those schools and asked, 'Does your medical school curriculum provide any information about Indian health problems and issues to the Indian students who go to your school?' And the answer was, no, one hundred percent. So, what I took out of that was that there was a large number of Indians being trained in other medical schools that really didn't have access to Indian health issues."

Since 1990, at annual meetings of the Indian Physicians' Association, he has provided a medical education day for Indian medical students that come to the meeting, giving them the information he teaches here in his Indian Health Class.

The University of Washington Medical School, he says, "is the only medical school that has an Indian Health Pathway and an Indian Health Class that is going on right now. There are a couple of other Native American Centers of Excellence, but they don't, they have not, for whatever reason, chosen to work on the curriculum and provide a curriculum for the Indian students at their medical school."