A tribe in Maine is using opioid settlement funds on a sweat lodge to treat addiction [View all]
A tribe in Maine is using opioid settlement funds on a sweat lodge to treat addiction
May 12, 20247:01 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
From
KFF Health News
By Aneri Pattani
The Mi'kmaq Nation in Maine spent about $50,000 of its opioid settlement funds to build a healing lodge it will use for traditional sweat ceremonies to help people recover from addiction.
Aneri Pattani/KFF Health News
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Outside the Mi'kmaq Nation's health department sits a dome-shaped tent, built by hand from saplings and covered in black canvas. It's one of several sweat lodges on the tribe's land, but this one is dedicated to helping people recover from addiction.
Up to 10 people enter the lodge at once. Fire-heated stones — called grandmothers and grandfathers, for the spirits they represent — are brought inside. Water is splashed on the stones, and the lodge fills with steam. It feels like a sauna, but hotter. The air is thicker, and it's dark. People pray and sing songs. When they leave the lodge, it is said, they reemerge from the mother's womb. Cleansed. Reborn.
The experience can be "a vital tool" in healing, said Katie Espling, health director for the roughly 2,000-member tribe.
She said patients in recovery have requested sweat lodges for years as a cultural element to complement the counseling and medications the tribe's health department already provides. But insurance doesn't cover sweat ceremonies, so, until now, the department couldn't afford to provide them.
In the past year, the Mi'kmaq Nation received more than $150,000 from settlements with companies that made or sold prescription painkillers and were accused of exacerbating the overdose crisis. A third of that money was spent on the sweat lodge.
more...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/12/1250379089/sweat-lodge-traditional-healing-addiction-recovery-opioid-settlement-funds
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