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Transcript: Bryce Mendez


[Mendez:]
Each island has a specific organization that infuses cultural practices and cultural values, and teaches Native Hawaiians how to live a healthier lifestyle. So a lot has to do with education, a lot has to do with bettering your health, improving physical activity, and it’s all through Native practices, Native activities. So that’s also a very successful program. The University of Hawai’i has a medical school, and they have a specific Native Hawaiian program that helps train Native Hawaiian physicians and providers to learn both the Western theory of medicine and also cultural practices and theories, and kind of infuse it into one, and learning how to implement that when they’re seeing their patients. How do you know that—okay— if you’re dealing with a “kapuna” or an elder and they are so stuck in their ways, what can you do? Or how can you tie the culture with Western medicine so that that they’ll kind of open up and say, “Okay, fine, I’ll go do that test you want me to do.”