Learning From Community: Emmie Gocke Explores Intercultural Healthcare in Villarrica
For Columbia medical student Emmie Gocke, her research experience on intercultural health models in the south of Chile has been as much about listening and learning as it has been about academic inquiry.
Emmie Gocke’s time researching intercultural healthcare in southern Chile has been an opportunity to learn from a community working to bring Indigenous knowledge and healing practices into the public healthcare system.
Gocke is a fourth-year medical student at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her research – presented during the webinar “Indigenous Contributions in Culturally Grounded Healthcare: An Intercultural Health Model in Villarrica, Chile” - focuses on the Box de Salud Mapuche, a community-run service operating within Villarrica Hospital. The initiative provides access to Mapuche traditional medicine within a public hospital setting, creating a space where Indigenous and Western approaches to healthcare can coexist.
Her in-field study and resulting webinar were developed by Columbia Global Center Santiago in partnership with Pontificia Universidad Católica (UC) de Chile’s Field Research Network (RCER UC) and UC’s Office of the Vice President for International Affairs. The event brought together Gocke’s field research and perspectives from professionals and community members working in and around the city of Villarrica, Araucanía Region, in the south of Chile.
The Araucanía Region is home to the highest proportion of Mapuche people of any region in Chile, with approximately one in three residents identifying as Mapuche. For Gocke, understanding the region’s history is essential to understanding its contemporary healthcare landscape. She highlighted the long history of Mapuche resistance and the loss of sovereignty in the late 19th century, as well as the subsequent impacts on land, culture, language and Indigenous knowledge.
Against this historical backdrop, Chile has progressively recognized Indigenous rights within its healthcare system. Gocke described how legislation beginning in 1993 and continuing through the recognition of the Indigenous health system in 2006 and the right to culturally appropriate care in 2012 ultimately led to Decree 21 in 2023. The decree requires public healthcare providers in areas with significant Indigenous populations to implement intercultural health models with components including Indigenous participation, protection of healing knowledge, intercultural facilitators and spiritual assistance.
In Villarrica, the health council Mesa de Salud Mapuche has been working for years to make Mapuche medicine accessible to the community. In December 2024, that work led to the establishment of the Box de Salud Mapuche: a room inside Villarrica Hospital where traditional healers can provide care to patients served by the hospital network. Between May and July 2025 alone, preliminary data showed 574 patients had been seen there.
The service is deeply community-driven. Healers are compensated according to mañumtun, a Mapuche philosophy of reciprocity, rather than through fixed salaries or fees. Patients contribute what they can, while much of the coordination and administration of the service are carried out through volunteer work.
Gocke’s research seeks to understand how this model works in practice and what other communities might learn from it. Working in close collaboration with the Mesa de Salud Mapuche, she conducted interviews with healers, community leaders, administrators and patients, while also spending time with community members in their homes and sharing mate – a traditional tea-like herbal infusion. Her study was designed to ensure that the findings would support the community’s own goals.
Her early observations point both to the promise of the model and to the challenges it faces. “There’s so much demand for this type of medicine within the community,” she said. “The box—the one room—simply can’t accommodate all of that.”
For many of those she interviewed, the longer-term aspiration is a dedicated Mapuche hospital: a multi-room facility where Mapuche and Western medicine could coexist and be practiced together.
Gocke will continue the work during her final year of medical school, producing a community report for the Mesa de Salud Mapuche, a scholarly paper examining the model through implementation-science frameworks, and a comparative review of intercultural health models in Chile and elsewhere.
For the Santiago Center, the project exemplifies the value of connecting Columbia students and researchers with communities and institutions in Chile, creating opportunities for academic inquiry that are grounded in local priorities and relationships.
And for Gocke, the experience has been as much about listening and learning as it has been about research. “I will be leaving Villarrica very inspired by this group of people and the work that they’re doing,” she reflected.