Blog
What Helps & What Doesn’t Help When Someone You Love Is Sick, Suffering, Grieving A Loss, or in Physical or Emotional Pain?
What Helps & What Doesn't Help When Someone You Love Is Sick, Suffering, Grieving A Loss, or in Physical or Emotional Pain?Someone I love just found out a loved one is very sick, afraid, and in pain. He knows that it's part of my work to train doctors how to...
A Retired OB/GYN’s Commentary On The Leaked News Of Our Supreme Court Overturning Roe Vs. Wade (& How I Did Abortions Because I Believed I’d Be A Hypocrite If I Didn’t).
When I interviewed for my OB/GYN residency at the prestigious Northwestern University program, which was my first choice, I was told very clearly that Northwestern's OB/GYN department supports a woman's right to choose whether she keeps a pregnancy or not, and that if...
The Difference Between Helpful Hope & Disheartening “Not Good Enough To Deserve A Miracle” Messaging About Healing When All Else Has Failed
In the original draft of my new book Sacred Medicine, the book opened with a legitimate, medically provable radical remission story about a child with a life-threatening illness conventional medicine had given up on. In desperation, the parents of the child,...
Germ Theory AND Terrain Theory
Those of you in the wellness world might have noticed a curious polarization between "germ theory" and "terrain theory" advocates during the pandemic. But as I write in my book Sacred Medicine: A Doctor's Quest To Unravel The Mysteries Of Healing, we can...
Memoir As Medicine: The Healing Power Of Writing Your Messy, Imperfect, Unruly (But Gorgeously Yours) Life Story
Synchrodestiny got hold of me recently. I had just gotten off the phone with Esalen Institute, planning my first post-pandemic 5 day Sacred Medicine workshop at Esalen in May and a month-long Burnout Recovery For Health Care Workers & Therapists in the fall,...
Why Do Innocent People Have To Suffer?
As I watch the horrifying news in Ukraine, as hospitals are bombed and unarmed civilians, some of them children, are killed, I can’t help wondering about the question I asked every healer, guru, spiritual leader, mind-body doctor, and trauma therapist during...
I Stand With Ukraine. I’m Also Unsettled By How Much White Lives Seem To Matter When Countless BIPOC Lives Are Still Threatened
It guts me- and so many of you- to watch the violence, to see the innocent people suffering, to gaze in horror as a bully abuses his fellow humans, to witness a colonizer invading, feeling entitled to a country he is not entitled to dominate. The human toll is...
Debunking The Law Of Attraction (Plus A More Empathic Sacred Medicine Healing Tool)
Although there is a grain of truth in the teachings, law of attraction folks put too much emphasis on thinking yourself well without acknowledging that illness is multifactorial, complex, and your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are only a part of what impacts your...
Let’s Not Polarize Into The Science Camp and the Anti-Science Camp: I Stand For The Camp Of No Camps
Sometimes we get sick, and conventional medicine can cure us lickety-split. And thank God for those cures and for the doctors who deliver them. I was once one of those doctors, and it felt so satisfying when one of those medical cures could ease the suffering of...