A Folk Healer in Urban Detroit

Tamra Meadows in her garden.
Tamra Meadows in her garden.

An interesting story but it raises the old question: how much credit goes to the herb and how much to the herb-doctor:

A lot of inner-city folks don’t have much money, don’t have any health insurance, and have little trust for the run-down clinics that cater to the poor. So if their illness isn’t too serious, many will rely on folk treatments or natural remedies passed down through families for years.

And they rely on people like Meadows. Her reputation in the neighborhood has even earned her the nickname “The Witch Doctor.”

“They say, ‘I know you got something over in the yard. I need you to fix me something up,'” Meadows says of her neighbors. She’s learned much of what she knows from books she’s studied, but a lot of it, she says, just comes to her. “I pray about it,” she says. “And I tell them, ‘It’s not me. It’s a power.’ Sometimes I tell God, ‘Leave me alone.'”

Read the rest.