Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors

``When we do not communicate, we are ill,'' asserts Navajo medicine woman Annie Kahn. Her belief that interpersonal relationships, good or bad communal energies, affect one's physical health is echoed by Hispanic curanderas , or women healers, interviewed for this cross-cultural report. Both the Amerindian and Hispanic traditions agree also that the transgressing of spiritual laws causes illness. Most curanderas , it seems, believe from an early age that they were predestined to channel the healing graces of God or the saints, using medicinal plants, herbs, charms and rituals. Counterposed to these traditions are what the authors call ``AMA American Medical Association medicine,'' yet the white professional women physicians interviewed here appear to be moving beyond a mechanistic, clinical approach. Instead of dissecting female healers under an anthropological microscope, the authors of this rewarding survey approach traditional medicine as a living entity with its own internal laws. Perrone is a photographer, Stockel a New Mexico Human Services administrator, Krueger a psychologist. Photos. (Oct.)