We’ve all been sick enough to know the difference between a healer and a doctor. A doctor may know medicine, and may (or may not) diagnose correctly. But a healer will do all of same and maybe also find a way to actually make you better. Not all docs are healers, and vice versa.

Docs will be the first to admit that they’re uncertain about a good percentage of the ailments we present them. Playing the odds in our favor, they treat for categories of condition, such as “inflammation”, “infection”, or muscular/skeletal. Ever have a doc lay the term “idiopathic” on you? It means “cause unknown”, but since you show the symptoms, they are knowledgeable enough to treat them, yet often unable to parse the underlying cause. Sometimes you get better, sometimes you don’t, and as an idiopathic patient, you live with the condition, die from it, or return for different treatment that you certainly can’t afford.

This is no knock on doctors. Some of my closest and most respected colleagues are docs, and I owe to them much of the credibility Tusker enjoys in its climbs on Kili, in the Himalayas, and soon to come, our treks in Bhutan. I’m just describing the accepted limits of medicine. And within those limits docs most often find a way to improve our quality of lives by alleviating symptoms.

I’m grateful they don’t shake sticks at us anymore, or use the razor to “bleed” us of our “humours”. Cutting someone who is sick seems so counterintuitive now, but the practice was bleeding edge (pardon the pun) for hundreds of years. Maybe they’ll say the same about chemo in centuries to come.

One of the greatest healers I know is doctor who never went to med school and who lives in Malawi. Fumuzapasi is his name, and he’s a witchdoctor, a “traditional healer”, as they say in polite society. Some of you who did my overland expeditions are lucky enough to have met him in his compound, and felt his hot, healing breath in your ear as he consulted you, blessed you, and somehow found a way to your deepest fears and even underlying conditions.

Others may have met his nearby colleague, Mungoma, seen here in his “operating theater”, in this dramatic video I put together.

Instead of stethoscopes, thermometers and metabolic panels, Fumuzapasi employs five fundamental tools of his trade: snuff, song, drums, dance, and his ancestors. Inside his medicine hut on dirt floors, driven by drums and copious amounts of snuff, he will sing and dance himself into a rhythmic trance, seeking contact with the spirits of his ancestors. Once he finds them (or they him), he’s overtaken by a trance, a transcendental state that empowers him with healing vision.

And I do not say this lightly. Dozens of fortunate Tusker travelers, including me, have been exposed to his prescient intensity. As his young drummers continue to peal out their rhythms, he squats, and one by one, brings his patients close, and intuitively, guided by the spirit, he holds forth on your soul, psyche, and underlying physical conditions. The din of the drums guarantees doctor-patient confidentiality.

And then, for an honorarium, he will prepare some juju for each patient, a dollop of specially prepared sympathetic magic to carry around in a small bag to ward of the spirits responsible for your various afflictions, be they physical, psychological or something in the realm of demonic possession. Inside the small bag goes a variety of exotic herbs, animal parts, and secret potions passed down through the generations.

Had I not seen it with my own eyes I would not believe how many of his Western patients—my friends, clients, even family—walked out from his hut awed by the accuracy of his intuition about their health and their lives. Many were driven to tears. Such is the power of a healer.

As to my own medicine, I’m reluctant to tell tales out of school, but suffice it to say he was most accurate in charting the course of my current marital bliss. Beyond that, I can recount (without naming names), a few telling episodes of Fumuzapasi’s stunning and consistent perspicacity: a young-ish man from California, blighted by a thieving business associate and a meddlesome “psychic” who had broken up his marriage, returns home with his small, red “protection” bag from the witchdoctor, emblazoned by python skin and a black eagle claw. I saw it. As folk art, it was forbidding. As medicine, it seemed to carry a rarer power: soon after his return home with his medicine, the young traveler’s fortunes change: the thief contracts some mysterious, undiagnosable “nerve disease”, ending his thieving ways for good, and the psychic’s sprawling home suffers a devastating fire. Twinned coincidence or not, overkill or not, the doctor certainly honed in on this guy’s “weak” spots and provided an albeit violent cure. For his part, the patient tossed his juju into the Pacific, fearful of any more dire consequences. I’m not superstitious by any stretch. I’m just saying…

A woman, a New Yorker, rushes from Fumuzapasi’s consult in tears, tells nobody anything about what he said, but once returning home, quits her job, and returns to Africa for a life of adventure. She’s settled now, back home, with family. Later, all she had to say is that “he read my deepest fears like a book. And my fear was that I was throwing my life away.” A man with chronic back pain is told that his weakness is “his gut”. Who knows? Without a prod from the doctor, maybe the man would not have healed his bad back with a core strengthening regimen.

The doctor also functions as priest and all-world wedding planner. After consulting him, a pair of clients, a common-law couple, decide that they want him to perform their marriage. His blessing, accompanied by a hundred’s-strong singing, drumming and dancing celebration, pulling from villages all around, can only attest to the largeness of Fumuzapasi’s spirit, and his local influence. Beating all odds of holy matrimony in our culture today, these two remain a strong couple, wedded to each other, and of course, to travel. They may have survived without his blessing, but as the old saying goes, “it didn’t hoit”.

The tales go on. Only in witnessing the countless stunned (or grateful) expressions onpeople’s faces can I even suggest that this charismatic bear of a man is a “healer”. At the very least, a “seer” with a deep intuition about people which he is able to convey.

Perhaps Fumuzapasi’s greatest achievement lies in his charity. A schoolteacher by trade, he wound up adopting thirty AIDS orphans, raising them in his compound as his own. Some of these kids have been groomed as his “medical assistants”—drummers, singers and (importantly) witnesses.

Fumuzapasi’s healing powers come from his largeness of spirit, his willingness to embrace all-comers, including the souls of his dead ancestors, who obviously grant him a more than average “vision”. Take the emotion evoked by the memory of the dear departed—a feeling we all know—and multiply it a thousand-fold, and maybe you get a sense of his personal power, the “heft” of his personality. You cannot help but be moved by his intensity, his gentleness, and his sense of the “other”—that he sees things in his “travels”, that he knows things that we possibly could not. Whatever the channel, the man feels, and he heals. Maybe he is simply able to tap into the power of the placebo.

And the best part? Getting there is tricky, but the wait isn’t bad.