The policy and a novel training program to introduce shamans to the principles of Western medicine are part of a national movement to consider patients’ cultural beliefs and values when deciding their medical treatment. The approach is being adopted by dozens of medical institutions and clinics across the country that cater to immigrant, refugee and ethnic-minority populations.

Image Va Meng Lee, another shaman, at Mercy Medical Center in Merced, Calif. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Certified shamans, with their embroidered jackets and official badges, have the same unrestricted access to patients given to clergy members.

Shamans do not take insurance or other payment, although they have been known to accept a live chicken.

A recent survey of 60 hospitals in the United States by the Joint Commission, the country’s largest hospital accrediting group, found that the hospitals were increasingly embracing cultural beliefs, driven sometimes by marketing, whether by adding calcium- and iron-rich Korean seaweed soup to the maternity ward menu at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, on the edge of Koreatown, or providing birthing doulas for Somali women in Minneapolis.

In Merced, about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco, the Mercy hospital shaman program was designed to strengthen the trust between doctors and the Hmong community  a form of healing in the broadest sense. It tries to redress years of misunderstanding between the medical establishment and the Hmong, whose lives in the mountains of Laos were irreparably altered by the Vietnam War. Hmong soldiers, Mr. Lee among them, were recruited by the C.I.A. in the 1960s to fight the covert war against Communist insurgents in Laos and afterward, to avoid retribution, were forced to flee to the refugee camps, with most resettling in California’s Central Valley and in the Midwest.