2008 Idaho Conference on Health Care
Larry Murillo
Larry Murillo is Shoshone from Fort Hall, Idaho on his mother’s side and Guamara from Mexico on his father’s side. He is an Assistant Professor at Idaho State University working as the Master’s of Public Health Program Director in the Health and Nutrition Science Department. Dr. Murillo holds a joint appointment in the Health and Nutrition Science Department and the Institute of Rural Health. Larry worked for three years at the Oregon Health and Science University and was associated with the One Sky Center. One of his accomplishments was to receive funding for a recently completed a two-year grant from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse Administration to study Native American Health Disparity. Larry received his doctoral degree in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interest is Native American culture and how it contributes to personal and public health. He has written a position paper on Native American Cultural Health Care for the National Institute of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. “Native American Public Health Issues” is a course he taught for three years in the school of public health at Berkeley. Dr. Murillo has worked for over 20 years with various Native American communities as a public health educator and community organizer. His specialized experience includes organizing traditional Native American cultural gatherings related to health, developing group facilitation and dialogue between health care providers and cultural health care practitioners involving integration of Western allopathic medicine and culture based medicine.
As a cultural health educator he has developed health promotion disease prevention programs in the areas of Maternal Child Health, AIDS, Tobacco Education, Diabetes, and Obesity. Using a cultural health model he developed a 10-year program designed to prevent obesity using an intervention plan that included medical, fitness, environmental, ethnic nutrition, cultural health practices, epidemiology and media advocacy services. The program was designed to account for the context of health and life experience of the Navajo, Hopi and Paiute people in Tuba City, Arizona. Larry has been honored as a keynote speaker at several statewide and National Health Conferences. Larry and a group of aerobic volunteers were awarded 4 national awards named after Jim Thorpe for obesity prevention work they accomplished in Tuba City, Arizona. His latest publication is a chapter in the book “Healing and Mental Health for Native Americans: Speaking in Red.” The chapter is called “Perspectives on Traditional Health Practices.” Dr. Murillo was invited to address a national conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Center on Science and the Environment. He participated on a plenary panel that addressed how science can become more holistic in addressing global warming and other environmental issues.