Cyril Naidoo, who directs the department of family medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, conducts workshops to traditional healers on how to help patients with AIDS and HIV. In Dr. Naidoo's workshop, the group discusses how to counsel patients about HIV and AIDS, how to refer them for testing, and then how to follow up with HIV-positive patients to ensure that they receive proper care and that the healers' own herbal remedies do not clash with the clinics' powerful and often toxic anti-retro-viral drugs. The healers have been learning about ideas that are alien to the way that they practice medicine: the existence of germs and viruses, the contribution of sexual practices to HIV's spread, and the ways in which viral loads and immune-system cell counts can be used to measure the progress of the disease. This article reports how the threat of HIV and AIDS has caused doctors like Cyril Naidoo and traditional healers to work together to stem the tide of death in their land.