Blending conventional medicine and Indigenous knowledge to care for patients as kin, not cases
Age: 38
Job Title: Emergency Medicine Physician and Anthropologist
Fresh out of high school, Dr. Ian MacNairn started studying health sciences, only to find Western approaches to medicine frustratingly inequitable. Anthropology, in contrast, opened a world of curiosity — one that led him to study communities, identity and well-being, and eventually to work closely with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Elders.
His early consulting fieldwork took him across Northern and Western Canada, visiting remote communities and walking the land with Knowledge Keepers who shared sacred stories and practices. The experience was humbling and instructive.
“I made a vow or commitment to a number of these grandmothers across northern B.C. and Alberta that I would come back with a relationship that was reciprocal,” Dr. MacNairn says. They were sharing one kind of medicine; he would return to share another.
He returned to school to earn both a PhD in anthropology and an MD, combining the rigour of medicine with the depth of cultural understanding. From rural family clinics to urban emergency rooms, he carries the teachings of Elders with him, treating patients with consideration to their relationships and histories. For MacNairn, the Lakota principle of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ — “all my relations” — is a compass, a way of seeing each patient not as a stranger, but as kin.
That compass is now guiding him far beyond Canada’s borders. In October, MacNairn joined a small team of physicians on a humanitarian mission to Gaza, where they provided emergency and trauma care to Palestinians for 15 days. The call to go, he says, arose during ceremony with Elders, where he came to understand his responsibility was to bring his skills in emergency medicine forward with compassion and purpose. The trip, he says, is both a humanitarian mission and a continuation of the vows he made to Elders to practise medicine in a reciprocal way.
This article appears in the November/December 2025 issue of Edify
