In one of my first and favorite undergraduate psychology courses, we read Thomas Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn helped us to see that scientific progress through the accumulation of knowledge (which we believe to be fact) is not as solid and linear as scientists might believe. Rather, there are cycles of learning across history. Every so often we will be challenged, leading to a paradigm shift where what we believed to be absolutely true might be completely discarded. After such a shift occurs, the way we look at knowledge in a field is never the same again. This important academic lesson has everything to do with Native health and “Good Medicine” today because the paradigm from which we are working determines what we think the problems are, as well as what we think is possible in terms of interventions.