“Ms. Taylor*?” “Yes, it’s me. I’m so deeply sorry to you and the team. You all helped me so much when I was here. But I started drinking a day after I left and blacked out.” Two weeks ago, Ms. Taylor was found by her…
Category: Psychiatry
How to talk with a struggling physician colleague
My friend, Lello Tesema, and I were sitting in a restaurant in Harvard Square. It was the first, feverish bit of spring when it seems like the entire city has emerged en masse from their winter dens. We were sitting outside under patio lights, wearing …
The problem with high-potency marijuana
Advocates for the legalization of medical and retail marijuana are quick to point out all the possible benefits that a community might see from such a venture. These include increased jobs, increased tax revenue, possible medical benefits and they adve…
How this student took care of his severe depression in medical school
We learn about it in school as a formula. There is a checklist that we are given, and we ask our patients these eight questions and then calculate whether or not they have depression. It’s so simple. Anyone can do it! I never once thought that I would …
Marijuana will not fix the opioid epidemic
Marijuana has been used for reported medical purposes for thousands of years when the plant had THC content of 0.5 to 3%. The most common reported medical use is for pain. Several states and the District of Columbia have some form of legalized marijuan…
A physician who lost his daughter
The day is etched in my memory. The knock at the door. Two detectives and one police officer. I knew the news was bad. We sat at our dinner table, and the dreaded words came: “Your daughter is dead.” “How?” I asked. “She hung herself during the night.”…
Qualifying conditions for medical marijuana
An excerpt from The Medical Marijuana Guide: Cannabis and Your Health. Despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services applied for a patent on cannabinoids as neuroprotectants and antioxidants in 1999 and was granted that patent …
Inaction is driving our collective burnout
I sat knee-to-knee with a nurse practitioner at a school-based clinic in rural Ohio. Choking back tears, she described a patient she couldn’t get out of her head: a middle-school girl, accompanied by her mother and a social worker. Just days prior, the…
Doctors and nurses are made to suffer
An excerpt from Please Don’t Die. While I was still writing this book, a local doctor killed himself. This was a younger psychiatrist with a successful practice, leaving three children after shooting himself in the head. What do you imagine his…
How near-death experiences profoundly change lives
An excerpt from The Science of Near-Death Experiences. Near-death experiences are an ancient and very common phenomenon that spans from ancient philosophy, religion, and healing to the most modern clinical practice of medicine. Modern advances in medic…
