Podcasts about Cambridge Health Alliance

Are you worried about whether your teen is just moody or actually struggling with depression? Do you wonder how much of their emotional ups and downs are connected to digital media? In this episode of Power Your Parenting: Moms with Teens, host Colleen O'Grady sits down with Dr. Meredith Gansner, a child psychiatrist and researcher, to discuss the rising rates of teen depression in the digital age. Together, they explore how social media, online interactions, and excessive screen time contribute to adolescent mental health struggles. Dr. Gansner shares insights from her research and her new book, Teen Depression Gone Viral, highlighting how parents can recognize signs of depression, differentiate between typical teen emotions and clinical concerns, and take proactive steps to support their child's well-being. They also tackle the difficult topic of suicidal ideation, how parents can navigate these conversations, and the importance of maintaining open communication while setting digital boundaries. Dr. Meredith Gansner is an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and attending child psychiatrist at Boston Children's Hospital. After completing medical school at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, she completed her psychiatry residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Brigham and Women's Hospital and a fellowship in child psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance. Her research explores high-risk digital media use in adolescents and managing high-risk digital media habits. She is an active member of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry media committee, has written articles about mental health and digital media for The Psychiatric Times,The Boston Globe, and Slate magazine. Key takeaways from this conversation include the importance of observing your teen's level of functioning rather than just their emotions, understanding that social media is not inherently harmful but can be risky without guidance, and remembering that parents need support too—caring for yourself helps you better support your teen. With expert advice and practical strategies, this episode empowers moms to feel more prepared to guide their teens through the challenges of growing up in a digital world. Learn more about Dr. Gansner at https://www.childrenshospital.org/directory/meredith-gansner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a textDr. Kevin Gendreau is a returning guest on our show! Be sure to check out his first appearance on episode 265 of Boundless Body Radio!Kevin R. Gendreau, MD, is a board-certified obesity medicine physician, author, and advocate for metabolic health based in Fall River, Massachusetts. With a personal journey of losing 125 pounds and reversing type II diabetes through lifestyle modifications, Dr. Gendreau brings a unique and compassionate perspective to his work.Dr. Gendreau earned his bachelor's degree at Boston University before completing his medical degree at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia. He completed residencies in Family Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance and Carney Hospital through Tufts University. He has also received an Honorarium for Prostate Cancer Research from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.He is passionate about helping others understand the hormonal and biological factors behind obesity, providing science-backed strategies for sustainable health.Dr. Gendreau is the author of Metabolic Health Handbook: A Doctor's Guide to Overcoming the Hormonal and Biological Barriers to Fat Loss, a comprehensive guide to achieving better metabolic health.He is also the author of Fasting While Furious: How I Turned Anger and Sadness into Motivation for Weight Loss, and the author of two children's books, having published A Healthier You with Sophia & Sue and Queen Celine's Vaccine Machine, blending his medical expertise with his creative talents to educate readers of all ages.Find Dr. Kevin Gendreau at-Find Dr. Gendreau at-https://kevingendreau.com/ IG- kevingendreau Find Boundless Body at- myboundlessbody.com Book a session with us here!

Dr. Martha Sweezy is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, a program consultant at Cambridge Health Alliance, and a psychotherapist in private practice. With over 18 years of experience in community mental health, she became a leading figure in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy after extensive training and clinical application. She has co-authored several influential books and manuals on IFS, including works on couple therapy, addiction, and shame. Martha is also the daughter of renowned cultural and intellectual figures, Nancy and Paul Sweezy.  https://marthasweezy.com/  https://ifs-institute.com/  https://www.cecesykeslcsw.com/ Thanks to our sponsor:  https://nutritionwithconfidence.com

For far too many, their experience with conventional psychiatry likely consisted of suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals, all without being considered as a whole person. It's probable that there is little exploration of the power of the sacred to promote healing, which is especially crucial in our current climate of widespread fear and disconnection.In psychiatrist Judy Tsafrir ‘s “Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness”, the reader is introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to psychiatric healing. It offers invaluable guidance on how to develop personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. Moreover, it illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine.Judy Tsafrir, MD is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts.  She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance.  Although thoroughly trained in the conventional allopathic approach to psychiatric care, she no longer endorses it, and in fact, believes that it causes harm.  The multi-modal approach she makes use of with her patients integrates her conventional training in adult and child psychiatry and psychoanalysis with functional medicine and Eastern medicine, ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP), archetypal psychology and trauma work, shamanism, energy healing, homeopathy and spiritual herbalism, astrology, the Tarot, and her commitment to Sacred activism.Find out more at https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For far too many, their experience with conventional psychiatry likely consisted of suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals, all without being considered as a whole person. It's probable that there is little exploration of the power of the sacred to promote healing, which is especially crucial in our current climate of widespread fear and disconnection. In psychiatrist Judy Tsafrir ‘s “Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness”, the reader is introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to psychiatric healing. It offers invaluable guidance on how to develop personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. Moreover, it illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine. Judy Tsafrir, MD is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts.  She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance.  Although thoroughly trained in the conventional allopathic approach to psychiatric care, she no longer endorses it, and in fact, believes that it causes harm.  The multi-modal approach she makes use of with her patients integrates her conventional training in adult and child psychiatry and psychoanalysis with functional medicine and Eastern medicine, ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP), archetypal psychology and trauma work, shamanism, energy healing, homeopathy and spiritual herbalism, astrology, the Tarot, and her commitment to Sacred activism. Find out more at https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For far too many, their experience with conventional psychiatry likely consisted of suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals, all without being considered as a whole person. It's probable that there is little exploration of the power of the sacred to promote healing, which is especially crucial in our current climate of widespread fear and disconnection. In psychiatrist Judy Tsafrir ‘s “Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness”, the reader is introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to psychiatric healing. It offers invaluable guidance on how to develop personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. Moreover, it illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine. Judy Tsafrir, MD is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. Although thoroughly trained in the conventional allopathic approach to psychiatric care, she no longer endorses it, and in fact, believes that it causes harm. The multi-modal approach she makes use of with her patients integrates her conventional training in adult and child psychiatry and psychoanalysis with functional medicine and Eastern medicine, ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP), archetypal psychology and trauma work, shamanism, energy healing, homeopathy and spiritual herbalism, astrology, the Tarot, and her commitment to Sacred activism. Find out more at https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/

Above is a brief video snippet from our conversation. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.Transcript with links to audio and external citationsEric Topol (00:06):Well, hello it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted to welcome Dr. Rachael Bedard, who is a physician geriatrician in New York City, and is actually much more multidimensional, if you will. She's a writer. We're going to go over some of her recent writings. She's actually quite prolific. She writes in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, New York Times, New York Review of Books. If it has New York in front of it, she's probably writing there. She's a teacher. She works on human rights, civil rights, criminal justice in the prison system. She's just done so much that makes her truly unique. That's why I really wanted a chance to meet her and talk with her today. So welcome, Rachael.Rachael Bedard (00:52):Thank you, Dr. Topol. It's an honor to be here.Eric Topol (00:55):Well, please call me Eric and it's such a joy to have a chance to get acquainted with you as a person who is into so many different things and doing all of them so well. So maybe we'd start off with, because you're the first geriatrician we've had on this podcast.Practicing Geriatrics and Internal MedicineEric Topol (01:16):And it's especially apropos now. I wanted maybe to talk about your practice, how you got into geriatrics, and then we'll talk about the piece you had earlier this summer on aging.Rachael Bedard (01:32):Sure. I went into medicine to do social justice work and I was always on a funny interdisciplinary track. I got into the Mount Sinai School of Medicine through what was then called the Humanities and Medicine program, which was an early acceptance program for people who were humanities focused undergrads, but wanted to go into medicine. So I always was doing a mix of politics and activist focused work, humanities and writing, that was always interested in being a doctor. And then I did my residency at the Cambridge Health Alliance, which is a social medicine program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and my chief residency there.(02:23):I loved being an internist, but I especially loved taking care of complex illness and I especially loved taking care of complex illness in situations where the decision making, there was no sort of algorithmic decision-making, where you were doing incredibly sort of complex patient-centered shared decision making around how to come up with treatment plans, what the goals of care were. I liked taking care of patients where the whole family system was sort of part of the care team and part of the patient constellation. I loved running family meetings. I was incredibly lucky when I was senior resident and chief resident. I was very close with Andy Billings, who was one of the founders of palliative care and in the field, but also very much started a program at MGH and he had come to work at Cambridge Hospital in his sort of semi-retirement and we got close and he was a very influential figure for me. So all of those things conspired to make me want to go back to New York to go to the Sinai has an integrated geriatrics and palliative care fellowship where you do both fellowships simultaneously. So I came to do that and just really loved that work and loved that medicine so much. There was a second part to your question.Eric Topol (03:52):Is that where you practice geriatrics now?Rachael Bedard (03:55):No, now I have ever since finishing fellowship had very unusual practice settings for a geriatrician. So right out of fellowship, I went to work on Rikers Island and then New York City jail system, and I was the first jail based geriatrician in the country, which is a sort of uncomfortable distinction because people don't really like to think about there being a substantial geriatric population in jails. But there is, and I was incredibly lucky when I was finishing fellowship, there was a lot of energy around jail healthcare in New York City and I wrote the guy who was then the CMO and said, do you think you have an aging problem? And he said, I'm not sure, but if you want to come find out, we'll make you a job to come find out. And so, that was an incredible opportunity for someone right out of fellowship.(04:55):It meant stepping off the sort of academic track. But I went and worked in jail for six years and took care of older folks and people with serious illness in jail and then left Rikers in 2022. And now I work in a safety net clinic in Brooklyn that takes care of homeless people or people who have serious sort of housing instability. And that is attached to Woodhull Hospital, which is one of the public hospitals in New York City. And there I do a mix of regular internal medicine primary care, but I preferentially see the older folks who come through, which is a really interesting, painful, complicated patient population because I see a fair amount of cognitive impairment in folks who are living in the shelter system. And that's a really hard problem to address.Frailty, The Aged, and LongevityEric Topol (05:54):Well, there's a theme across your medical efforts. It seems to me that you look after the neglected folks, the prisoners, the old folks, the homeless people. I mean that's kind of you. It's pretty impressive. And there's not enough of people like you in the medical field. Now, no less do you do that, but of course you are a very impressive author, writer, and of many topics I want to get into with you, these are some recent essays you've written. The one that piqued my interest to start to understand who you were and kind of discover this body of work was the one that you wrote related to aging and President Biden. And that was in New York Times. And I do want to put in a quote because as you know very well, there's so much interest in longevity now.Eric Topol (06:51):Interrupting the aging process, and this one really stuck with me from that op-ed, “Time marches forward, bodies decline, and the growing expectation that we might all live in perfect health until our 100th birthdays reflects a culture that overprizes longevity to the point of delusion.” So maybe if you could tell us, that was a rich piece, you got into frailty, you related it to the issues that were surrounding President Biden who at that time had not withdrawn from the race. But what were you thinking and what are your thoughts about the ability to change the aging process?Rachael Bedard (07:36):I am very interested in, I mean, I'm incredibly interested in the science of it. And so, I guess I think that there are a few things.(07:49):One thing is that the framework that, the part that gives me pause the most is this framework that anything less than perfect health is not a life worth living. So if you're going to have a long life, life should not just be long and sort of healthy in relative terms to your age cohort, but healthy that when you're 80 you should feel like you have the health of a 45-year-old is my understanding of the culture of longevity science. And while I understand why that's aspirational and everybody worry about my body's decline, I think it's a really problematic thing to say that sick bodies are bodies that have disability or people who have cognitive difference are somehow leading lesser lives or lives that are not meaningful or not worth living. I think it's a very, very slippery slope. It puts you in a place where it sort of comes up against another trend or another emerging cultural trend, which is really thinking a lot about physician-assisted suicide and end of life choices.(09:04):And that in some ways that conversation can also be very focused on this idea that there's just no way that it's worth living if you're sick. And that's just not true, I think, and that's not been true for many, many, many of my patients, some of whom have lived with enormous disability and incredible burden of illness, people who are chronically seriously ill and are still leading lives that for them and for the people who love them are filled with meaning. So that's my concern about the longevity stuff. I'm interested in the science around the longevity stuff for sure. I'm interested in, I think we're living in this really interesting moment where there's so much happening across so many of the chronic disease fields where the things that I think have been leading to body decay over the last several decades for the majority of the population, we're sort of seeing a lot of breakthroughs in multiple fronts all at once. And that's really exciting. I mean, that's really exciting. And so, certainly if it's possible to make it to 100 in wonderful health, that's what I'd wish for all of us. But to hold it up as the standard that we have to achieve, I think is both unrealistic and a little myopic.Eric Topol (10:28):Yeah. Well, I certainly agreed with that and I think that that particular essay resonated so well and you really got into frailty and the idea about how it can be potentially prevented or markedly delayed. And I think before we move on to one of those breakthroughs that you were alluding to, any comments about the inevitability of frailty in people who are older, who at some point start to get the dwindles, if you will, what do you have to say about that?Rachael Bedard (11:11):Well, from a clinical standpoint, I guess the caveat versus that not everybody becomes frail and dwindles exactly. Some people are in really strong health up until sort of their final years of life or year of life and then something happens, they dwindle quickly and that's how they die. Or some people die of acute events, but the vast majority of us are going to become more frail in our final decades than we are in our middle decades. And that is the normal sort of pattern of wear and tear on the body. And it is an extraordinary framework, I think frailty because the idea of this sort of syndrome of things where it's really not a disease framework, it is a syndrome framework and it's a framework that says many, many small injuries or stressors add up to create a lot of stress and change in a body and trauma for our body. And once you are sort of past a tipping point of an amount of stress, it's very hard to undo those things because you are not sort of addressing one pathologic process. You're addressing, you're trying to mitigate many processes all at once.(12:31):When I wrote that piece, it was inspired by the conversation surrounding President Biden's health. And I was particularly struck by, there was a huge amount of clinical speculation about what was going on with him, right? I'm sure you remember there were people, there was all of this talk about whether he had Parkinson's and what his cognitive status was. And it felt to me like there was an opportunity to do some public education around the idea that you need not have one single sort of smoking gun illness to explain decline. What happens to most of us is that we're going to decline in many small ways sort of simultaneously, and it's going to impact function when it tips over a little bit. And that pattern of decline is not going to be steady day over day worsening. It's going to be up and down. And if you slept better the night before, you might have a better day the next day. And if you slept badly, you might have a worse day. And without knowing anything specific about his clinical situation, it felt like a framework that could explain so much of what we were seeing in public. And it was important also, I think to say that nothing was necessarily being hidden from anybody and that this is the kind of thing that, this has accumulated stress over time that then presents suddenly all at once after having been submerged.Eric Topol (14:01):Yeah, you reviewed that so well about the wear and tear and everything related to that. And before I move on to the second topic, I want to just circle back to something you alluded to, which is when Peter Attia wrote about this medicine 3.0 and how you would be compressed and you'd have no comorbidities, you'd have no other illnesses and just fall off the cliff. As a geriatrician, do you think that that is even conceivable?Rachael Bedard (14:35):No. Do you think it is?Eric Topol (14:37):No, but I just wanted to check the reality. I did challenge on an earlier podcast and he came up with his pat answer. But no, there's no evidence of that, that maybe you can delay if there ever was a way to do that. But I think there's this kind of natural phenomena that you just described, and I'll refer people also to that excellent piece that you get into it more.Rachael Bedard (15:06):Peter Attia, I mean, he is certainly the sort of standard bearer in my mind of that movement and that science or that framework of thinking about science. And there's stuff in there that's really valuable. The idea of thinking about lifestyle in your middle decades is having meaningful impact on how you will age, what your final years will look like. That seems intuitively true, I think. And so, thinking about his emphasis on exercise, I mean, his emphasis on exercise is particularly intense and not super achievable for the average person, but the idea that you should sort of be thinking about keeping your body strong because it will decline eventually. And so, you want to do that from a higher peak. That makes a lot of sense to me. The idea that where we sort of draw pathologic disease cutoffs is obviously a little bit arbitrary. And so, wanting to think about optimizing pre-disease states and doing prevention, that's obviously, I think pretty appealing and interesting. It's just really in an evidence free zone.Ozempic for the IndigentEric Topol (16:18):Yeah, that's what I confronted him with, of course, he had a different perspective, but you summed that up really well. Now let's switch to a piece you had in New York magazine. It was entitled, What If Ozempic Is Just a Good Thing? And the reason, of course, this ties into the first thing we're discussing. There's even talk now, the whole GLP-1 family of drugs with the dual triple receptors, pills to come that we're going to be able to interrupt a path towards Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Obviously you've already seen impact in heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease way before that, diabetes and obesity. So what are your thoughts? Because you wrote a very interesting, you provided a very interesting perspective when you wrote that one.Rachael Bedard (17:11):So that piece I wrote because I have this unbelievably privileged, interesting clinical practice. In New York City, there is public health insurance basically available to anybody here, including folks who are undocumented. And the public hospital system has pharmacies that are outpatient pharmacies that have, and New York Medicaid is very generous and they arranged through some kind of brilliant negotiating. I don't quite know how to make Ozempic to make semaglutide available to people who met criteria which meant diabetes plus obesity, but that we could prescribe it even for our very, very poor patients and that they would be able to get it reliably, that we would have it in stock. And I don't know how many other practices in the country are able to reliably provide GLP-1s to marginalized folks like that. I think it feels like a really rare opportunity and a very distinct perspective.(18:23):And it has just been the most amazing thing, I think to have this class of drugs come along that, as you say, addresses so many problems all at once with at least in my prescribing experience, a relatively mild tolerable side effect profile. I have not had patients who have become incredibly sick with it. And for folks where making that kind of impact on their chronic illness is so critical to not just their longevity, but their disease status interacts so much with their social burden. And so, it's a very meaningful intervention I think around poverty actually.(19:17):I really feel that almost all of the popular press about it has focused very much on use amongst the wealthy and who's getting it off label and how are they getting it and which celebrities are taking it, and what are the implications for eating and diet culture and for people who have eating disorders. And that's a set of questions that's obviously sort of interesting, but it's really interesting in a very rarefied space. There's an unbelievable diabetes epidemic in this country, and the majority of people who have diabetes are not the people who are getting written about over and over again in those pieces. It's the patients that I take care of, and those people are at risk of ending up on dialysis or getting amputations. And so, having a tool this effective is really miraculous feeling to me.Eric Topol (20:10):Well, it really gives me some hope because I don't know any program like that one, which is the people who need it the most. It's getting provided for them. And we have been talking about a drug that costs a thousand dollars a month. It may get down to $500 a month, but that's still a huge cost. And of course, there's not much governmental coverage at this point. There might be some more for Medicare, Medicaid, whatever in the future, but it's really the original criteria of diabetes, and it took almost 20 years to get to where we are right now. So what's so refreshing here is to know that there's at least one program that is helping to bridge the inequities and to not make it as was projected, which was, as you say, for celebrities and wealthy people more exclusively, so that's great. And we still don't know about the diverse breadth of these effects, but as you well know, there's trials in Alzheimer's. I spoke to Steve Horvath recently on the podcast and he talked about how it's reset the epigenetic clock, GLP-1.Rachael Bedard (21:24):Does he think so?Eric Topol (21:26):Whoa. Yeah, there was evidence that was just presented about that. I said, well, if that does correspond to aging, the thing that we spoke about first, that would be very exciting.Rachael Bedard (21:37):It's so wild. I mean, it's so exciting. It's so exciting to me on so many levels. And one of them is it's just exploding my mental model of disease pathogenesis, and it's making me think, oh my goodness, I have zero idea actually how metabolism and the brain and sort of cardiovascular disease, all of those things are obviously, what is happening in the interplay between all of those different systems. It's really so much more complicated and so much more interdependent than I understood it to be. I am really optimistic about the Alzheimer's trial. I am excited for those results, and I think we're going to keep seeing that it prevents different types of tumors.Eric Topol (22:33):Yeah, no, and that's been shown at least certainly in obese people, that there's cancers that gets way reduced, but we never had a potent anti-inflammatory that works at the brain and systemically like this before anyone loses the weight, you already see evidence.Long Covid and ME/CFS(22:50):It is pretty striking. Now, this goes back to the theme that was introduced earlier about looking after people who are neglected, who aren't respected or generally cared for. And I wanted to now get into Long Covid and the piece you wrote in the New Yorker about listening to patients, called “what would it mean for scientists to listen to patients?” And maybe you can talk about myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue (ME/CFS), and of course Long Covid because that's the one that is so pervasive right now as to the fact that these people don't get respect from physicians. They don't want to listen to their ailments. There's no blood tests, so there's no way to objectively make a diagnosis supposedly. And they're basically often dismissed, or their suffering is discounted. Maybe you can tell us again what you wrote about earlier this year and any updated thoughts.Rachael Bedard (24:01):Have you had my friend Harlan Krumholz on the show to talk about the LISTEN study?Eric Topol (24:04):Not yet. I know Harlan very well. Yes.Eric Topol (24:11):I know Akiko Iwasaki very well too. They're very, very close.Rachael Bedard (24:14):So, Akiko Iwasaki and Harlan Krumholz at Yale have been running this research effort called the LISTEN study. And I first learned about it sometime in maybe late 2021. And I had been really interested in the emerging discourse around chronic illness in Long Covid in the 2021. So when we were past the most acute phase of the pandemic, and we were seeing this long tail of sequelae in patients, and the conversation had really shifted to one that was about sort of trying to define this new syndrome, trying to understand it, trying to figure out how you could diagnose it, what were we seeing sort of emerge, how are we going to draw boxes around it? And I was so interested in the way that this syndrome was really patient created. It came out of patients identifying their own symptoms and then banning together much, much faster than any kind of institutional science can ever work, getting into message boards together or whatever, and doing their own survey work and then coming up with their own descriptive techniques about what they were experiencing.(25:44):And then beyond that, looking into the literature and thinking about the treatments that they wanted to try for themselves. Patients were sort of at the forefront of every step of recognizing, defining, describing this illness presentation and then thinking about what they wanted to be able to do for themselves to address it. And that was really interesting to me. That was incredibly interesting to me. And it was also really interesting because by, I don't know exactly when 2021 or 2022, it was already a really tense landscape where it felt like there were real factions of folks who were in conflict about what was real and what wasn't real, how things ought to be studied, who ought to be studying them, what would count as evidence in this realm. And all of those questions were just really interesting to me. And the LISTEN study was approaching them in this really thoughtful way, which was Harlan and Akiko sort of partnering really closely with patients who enrolled.(26:57):And it's a decentralized study and people could enroll from all over the world. There's a portion of patients who do have their blood work evaluated, but you can also just complete surveys and have that data count towards, and those folks would be from anywhere in the world. Harlan did this amazing, amazing work to figure out how to collect blood samples from all over the country that would be drawn at home for people. So they were doing this decentralized study where people from their homes, from within the sort of circumstances of their lives around their chronic illness could participate, which that was really amazing to me. And then they were partnering really thoughtfully with these patients just to figure out what questions they wanted to ask, how they wanted to ask them, and to try to capture a lot of multimodal data all at once.(27:47):Survey data, journaling so people could write about their own experience in a freeform journal. They were collecting blood samples, and they were holding these town halls. And the town halls were on a regular basis, Harlan and Akiko, and anybody who was in the study could come on, could log onto a Zoom or whatever, and Harlan and Akiko and their research staff would talk about how things were going, what they were working on, what questions they had, what the roadblocks were, and then they would answer questions from their participants as the study was ongoing. And I didn't think that I had ever heard of something quite like that before. Have you ever heard of anything?Eric Topol (28:32):No. I mean, I think this is important to underscore, this was the first condition that was ever patient led, patient named, and basically the whole path was laid by the patient. So yes, and everything you summarize is so well as to the progress that's been made. Certainly, Harlan and Akiko are some of the people that have really helped lead the way to do this properly as opposed to, unfortunately one and a half billion dollars that have been put to the NIH for the RECOVER efforts that haven't yet led to even a significant clinical trial, no less a validated treatment. But I did think it was great that you spotlighted that just because again, it's thematic. And that gets me to the fourth dimension, which is you're the first prison doctor I've ever spoken to. And you also wrote a piece about that called, “the disillusionment of a Rikers Island Doctor” in the New Yorker, I think it was. And I wonder if you could tell us, firstly, now we're four years into Covid, you were for a good part of that at Rikers Island, I guess.The Rikers Island Prison Doctor During CovidRachael Bedard (30:00):I was, yeah.Eric Topol (30:00):Yeah. And what could be a more worrisome spot to be looking after people with Covid in a prison? So maybe you could just give us some insight about all that.Rachael Bedard (30:17):Yeah, it was really, I mean, it was the wildest time, certainly in my career probably that I'll ever have. In the end of February and beginning of March of 2020, it became very apparent to my colleagues and I that it was inevitable that this virus that was in Wuhan and in Italy was coming to the US. And jails are, we sort of jokingly described them as the worst cruise ships in the world. They are closed systems where everybody is eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, everything on top of each other. There's an incredible amount of excess human contact in jails and prisons because people don't have freedom of movement and they don't get to do things for themselves. So every single, somebody brings you your mail, somebody brings you your meals, somebody brings you your medications. If you're going to move from point A to point B, an officer has to walk you there. So for a virus that was going to spread through what we initially thought was droplets and then found out was not just droplets but airborne, it was an unbelievably high-risk setting. It's also a setting where folks tend to be sicker than average for their age, that people bring in a lot of comorbidity to the setting.(31:55):And it's not a setting that does well under stress. I mean, jails and prisons are places that are sort of constitutionally violent, and they're not systems that adapt easily to emergency conditions. And the way that they do adapt tends to be through repressive measures, which tends to be violence producing rather than violence quelling. And so, it was just an incredibly scary situation. And in mid-March, Rikers Island, the island itself had the highest Covid prevalence of anywhere in the country because New York City was the epicenter, and Rikers was really the epicenter within New York. It was a wild, wild time. Our first seriously ill patient who ended up getting hospitalized. That was at that time when people were, we really didn't understand very much about what Covid looked like. And there was this guy sitting on the floor and he said, I don't know. I can't really get up.(32:59):I don't feel well. And he had an O2 stat of 75 or something. He was just incredibly hypoxic. It's a very scary setting for that kind of thing, right? It's not a hospital, it's not a place where you can't deliver ICU level care in a place like that. So we were also really worried about the fact that we were going to be transferring all of these patients to the city hospitals, which creates a huge amount of extra burden on them because an incarcerated patient is not just the incarcerated patients, the officers who are with that person, and there are special rules around them. They have to be in special rooms and all of these things. So it was just a huge systems crisis and really painful. And we, early on, our system made a bunch of good guesses, and one of our good guesses was that we should just, or one of our good calls that I entirely credit my bosses with is that they understood that we should advocate really hard to get as many people out as we could get out. Because trying to just manage the population internally by moving people around was not going to be effective enough, that we really need to decant the setting.(34:18):And I had done all of this work, this compassionate release work, which is work to get people who are sick out of jail so that they can get treatment and potentially die in a free setting. And so, I was sort of involved in trying to architect getting folks who were sort of low enough security risks out of jail for this period of time because we thought that they would be safer, and 1500 people left Rikers in the matter of about six weeks.Rachael Bedard (34:50):Which was a wild, wild thing. And it was just a very crazy time.Eric Topol (34:56):Yeah. Well, the word compassion and you go together exceptionally well. I think if we learn about you through your writings, that really shines through and what you've devoted your care for people in these different domains. This is just a sampling of your writings, but I think it gives a good cross section. What makes you write about a particular thing? I mean, obviously the Rikers Island, you had personal experience, but why would you pick Ozempic or why would you pick other things? What stimulates you to go after a topic?Rachael Bedard (35:42):Sometimes a lot of what I write about relates to my personal practice experience in some way, either to geriatrics or death and dying or to the criminal justice system. I've written about people in death row. I've written about geriatrics and palliative care in sort of a bunch of different ways. I am interested in topics in medicine where things are not yet settled, and it feels very of the moment. I'm interested in what the discourse is around medicine and healthcare. And I am interested in places where I think the discourse, not just that I'm taking a side in that discourse, but where I think the framework of the discourse is a little bit wrong. And I certainly feel that way about the Ozempic discourse. And I felt that way about the discourse around President Biden, that we're having not just a conversation that I have a strong opinion about, but a conversation that I think is a little bit askew from the way that we ought to be thinking about it.Eric Topol (36:53):And what I love about each of these is that you bring all that in. You have many different points of view and objective support and they're balanced. They're not just trying to be persuasive about one thing. So, as far as I know, you're extraordinarily unique. I mean, we are all unique, but you are huge standard deviations, Rachael. You cover bases that are, as I mentioned, that are new to me in terms of certainly this podcast just going on for now a couple of years, that is covering a field of both geriatrics and having been on the corrections board and in prison, particularly at the most scary time ever to be working in prison as a physician. And I guess the other thing about you is this drive, this humanitarian theme. I take it you came from Canada.Rachael Bedard (37:59):I did.Eric Topol (37:59):You migrated to a country that has no universal health.Rachael Bedard (38:03):That's right.Eric Topol (38:03):Do you ever think about the fact that this is a pretty pathetic situation here?Rachael Bedard (38:08):I do. I do think about it all the time.Eric Topol (38:10):In our lifetime, we'll probably never see universal healthcare. And then if you just go a few miles up north, you pretty much have that.Rachael Bedard (38:18):Yeah, if you've lived in a place that has universal healthcare and you come here, it's really sort of hard to ever get your mind around. And it has been an absolute possessing obsession of my entire experience in the US. I've now been here for over 20 years and still think it is an unbelievably, especially I think if you work with marginalized patients and how much their lack of access compounds the difficulty of their lives and their inability to sort of stabilize and feel well and take care of themselves, it's really frustrating.Advice for Bringing Humanities to Medicine in a CareerEric Topol (39:14):Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess my last question to you, is you have weaved together a career that brings humanities to medicine, that doesn't happen that often. What's your advice to some of the younger folks in healthcare as to how to pull that off? Because you were able to do it and it's not easy.Rachael Bedard (39:39):My main advice when people ask me about this, especially to students and to residents who are often the people who are asking is to write when you can or pursue your humanities interests, your critical interests, whatever it is that you're doing. Do it when you can, but trust that your career is long and that you have a lot of time. Because the thing that I would say is I didn't start publishing until I was in fellowship and before that I was busy because I was learning to become a doctor. And I think it's really important that my concern about being a doctor who's a hybrid, which so many of us are now. A doctor or something else is you really do want to be a good doctor. And becoming a good doctor is really hard. And it's okay if the thing that is preoccupying you for the first 10 years of your training is becoming a great clinician. I think that's a really, really important thing to do. And so, for my first 10 years for med school and residency and chief residency and fellowship, I would write privately on the side a fair amount, but not try to publish it, not polish that work, not be thinking in sort of a careerist way about how I was going to become a doctor writer because I was becoming a doctor. And that was really preoccupying.(41:08):And then later on, I both sort of had more time and mental space to work on writing. But also, I had the maturity, I think, of being a person who was comfortable in my clinical identity to have real ideas and insights about medicine that felt different and unique to me as opposed to, I barely understand what's going on around me and I'm trying to pull it together. And that's how I would've been if I had done it more, I think when I was younger. Some people are real prodigies and can do it right out the gate, but I wasn't like that.Eric Topol (41:42):No, no, I think that's really sound advice because that's kind of the whole foundation for everything else. Is there a book in the works or will there be one someday?Rachael Bedard (41:53):There may be one someday. There is not one now. I think about it all the time. And that same advice applies, which is I believe in being a late bloomer and taking your time and figuring out what it is you really want to do.Eric Topol (42:10):Yeah. Well, that's great. Have I missed anything? And obviously we only can get to know you in what, 40 minutes to some extent, but have I not touched on something that you want to bring up?Rachael Bedard (42:23):No, I don't think so. Thank you for this conversation. It's been lovely.Eric Topol (42:28):No, I really enjoyed it. I'll be following your career. It's extraordinary already and you've got decades ahead to make an impact and obviously thinking of all these patients that you look after and have in the past, it's just extraordinary. So what a joy to talk with you, Rachael, and I hope we'll have a chance to do that again in the times ahead.Rachael Bedard (42:51):Me as well. Thank you so much for inviting me.**********************************************Thank you for listening, reading or watching!The Ground Truths newsletters and podcasts are all free, open-access, without ads.Please share this post/podcast with your friends and network if you found it informative!Voluntary paid subscriptions all go to support Scripps Research. Many thanks for that—they greatly help fund our education and summer internship programs.Thanks to my producer Jessica Nguyen and Sinjun Balabanoff for audio and video support at Scripps Research.Note: you can select preferences to receive emails about newsletters, podcasts, or all I don't want to bother you with an email for content that you're not interested in. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

As the Medicare enrollment period gets underway again, we welcome Dr. Adam Gaffney to remind us the ways all those heavily advertised Medicare Advantage programs are ripping you off. Then we receive another house call from Dr. Marty Makary, author of Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health about the effect of medical groupthink on all kinds of accepted treatments from peanut allergies to opioid addiction. Finally, founder of Media Matters, David Brock stops by to discuss his latest book, Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America.Dr. Adam Gaffney is a physician, writer, public health researcher, and advocate. Dr. Gaffney practices at the Cambridge Health Alliance and is an Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. A member of the Cambridge Health Justice Lab, his research focuses on healthcare financing, reform, and equity, and disparities in lung health. He writes about the policy, politics, and history of health care, and is the author of To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History.The reality is we don't need Medigap. We could plug those holes with public coverage. There's no reason to have a role for private insurers to cover a slice of our healthcare when all seniors need the same thing—which is comprehensive universal care.  There's no need for these private stopgap measures, when what we need is a public system of universal care.Dr. Adam GaffneyI do think there's growing interest among physicians in change. Their bosses are increasingly these for-profit companies whose mission is not really medicine. Their mission is money. And what we need to do is to rethink our healthcare system, so it serves communities, is owned by communities, and it returns us to the underlying reason why we went into this profession—which is to help patients, and not to pad the pockets of shareholders.Dr. Adam GaffneyDr. Marty Makary is a Johns Hopkins professor and member of the National Academy of Medicine. He is the author of two New York Times best-selling books, Unaccountable and The Price We Pay. Dr. Makary has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and he has published more than 250 scientific research articles. He served in leadership at the W.H.O. and has been a visiting professor at 25 medical schools. His latest book is Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.For most of human history, doctors were respected, but maybe like you would respect your hairdresser, or maybe a clergy member in the community. And we didn't have many tools as doctors. We had a lancet, we had a saw to do amputations, we had a couple of drugs that didn't work or were counterproductive like digoxin. And then what happened in 1922 is Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. And by the post-World War II era in the 1940s and '50s, we saw the mass production of antibiotics. That ushered in the white coat era of medicine. Doctors began to wear a white coat. They now had the power to prescribe a magical pill that could cure disease, make childbirth safe, enable surgeons to do procedures safer. And this ushered in this new unquestioned authority. And what happened was, physicians as a class took advantage of this unquestioned authority.Dr. Marty MakaryDavid Brock is a Democratic activist and founder of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group. Following the 2010 elections, Mr. Brock founded the Super PAC American Bridge, which works to elect Democrats. He is a New York Times best-selling author, and his books include the memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, Killing the Messenger: The Right Wing Plot to Hijack Your Government, and his latest book is Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America.The Federalist Society was originally founded by three rightwing law students. And it was pitched as a debating society. So I don't think in the original incarnation, they had a master plan. But soon enough, they realized that membership in the Federalist Society could confer on people a certain imprimatur for appointments—and that's appointments not only to the federal judiciary, but all through the executive branch.David BrockThe scheme to overturn Roe has been going on for all these decades. There were setbacks, of course, because there were times when Republican appointees ended up being independent—Sandra Day O 'Connor, for example, David Souter, for example—and the right was defeated in their effort to overturn Roe. So it took a while and it took a lot of steadfast, patient spending of money on their crusade.David Brock[This is] a time when the Biden regime is supporting the destruction of the ancient land of Lebanon— whom he's called in prior years an ally. He's letting Netanyahu destroy Lebanon with the same tactics that Netanyahu applied to the genocide in Gaza.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DeSantisNews 10/23/241. Last week, Israel announced they had killed longtime Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. As NBC put it, the footage of his death released by Israel “showed Sinwar not hiding in a tunnel surrounded by hostages — as Israeli officials often claimed he was — but aboveground and hurling a stick at a drone with his last ounce of strength.” American political leaders, such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, are seeking to use Sinwar's death to argue that Israel has accomplished its mission and should therefore conclude its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Israeli leaders however have made it abundantly clear that they have no intention of pulling out of Gaza, with Benny Gantz – chairman of Israel's National Unity Party and among Prime Minister Netanyahu's chief political rivals – stating that the Israeli military “will continue to operate in the Gaza Strip for years to come,” per Al Jazeera.2. According to POLITICO, during an August 29th meeting in Washington Lise Grande, the top U.S. official working on the humanitarian situation in Gaza told the leaders of more than a dozen aid organizations that “the U.S. would not consider withholding weapons from Israel for blocking food and medicine from entering [Gaza].” It is illegal to block the delivery of humanitarian assistance under both American and international human rights law. As the paper notes, Grande's “candid assessment…raises questions about the seriousness of recent Biden administration threats to [withhold arms].” One attendee told POLITICO “[Grande] was saying that the rules don't apply to Israel.”3. Meanwhile, Israel continues its war on the United Nations mission in Lebanon. On October 20th, UNIFIL released a statement saying “Earlier today, an IDF bulldozer deliberately demolished an observation tower and perimeter fence of a UN position in Marwahin…The IDF has repeatedly demanded that UNIFIL vacate its positions along the Blue Line and has deliberately damaged UN positions. Despite the pressure being exerted on the mission and our troop-contributing countries…We will continue to undertake our mandated tasks.” UNIFIL added “Yet again, we note that breaching a UN position and damaging UN assets is a flagrant violation of international law and Security Council resolution 1701.”4. In a frankly dystopian story from the United Kingdom, British counterterrorism police “raided the home and seized several electronic devices belonging to The Electronic Intifada's associate editor Asa Winstanley,” despite the fact that Winstanley has not been charged with any offense. Electronic Intifada reports the raid was conducted under sections 1 and 2 of the 2006 “Terrorism Act,” which deal with the “encouragement of terrorism.” Human Rights Watch has previously urged the British government to repeal the repressive provisions of the 2006 act noting that “the definition of the encouragement of terrorism offense is overly broad, raising serious concerns about undue infringement on free speech.” Electronic Intifada further notes “In August, Britain's Crown Prosecution Service issued a warning to the British public to ‘think before you post' and threatening that it would prosecute anyone it deemed guilty of what it calls ‘online violence.'” Winstanley is the author of Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn and has been interviewed by the Capitol Hill Citizen.5. According to the Libertarian magazine Reason, Bob Woodward's new book War includes a passage about a “shockingly blunt conversation,” between President Biden and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham regarding “Biden's attempts to negotiate a ‘megadeal' between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.” Per Reason “Graham reportedly said that only Biden could secure a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty, because it would ‘take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia'” Biden's response? “Let's do it.” Furthermore, reports indicate this security pact only fell apart after October 7th, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman seeing a prominent deal with Israel at that time as a major political liability. Reason cites an article from the Atlantic in January wherein Salman reportedly told Secretary of State Antony Blinken “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don't, but my people do…Half my advisers say that the deal is not worth the risk. I could end up getting killed because of this deal.”6. In more international news, the Cuban energy grid collapsed on Friday, under strain from Hurricane Oscar. The complete grid collapse left the entire country of 10 million without electricity, per NPR. Reuters reports that over the weekend, the grid failed three more times as authorities sought to restore power. Brasil de Fato, or BdF, a Brazilian socialist news service, reports China, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, Russia and Barbados are offering support to Cuba amid the total blackout. BdF further reports “The Alba Movimientos platform, which brings together more than 400 organizations from 25 countries, issued a statement...[saying] ‘No one can attribute this virtual collapse of the Cuban electricity system to a specific measure by the US government – that would be too simplistic…this is'“the result of a long strategy of planned destruction of the material and spiritual living conditions of the Cuban population…with the financial resources denied to Cuba due to the blockade policy, 18 days of accumulated damages equal the annual cost of maintaining the country's electricity system.” According to the UN, the U.S. embargo cost Cuba $13 million US dollars per day between 2022 and 2023 alone.7. A new scandal has rocked American Higher Education. Inside Higher Ed reports “Last week a lawsuit accused 40 colleges and universities, as well as the nonprofit College Board, of participating in a price-fixing conspiracy to jack up tuition rates” specifically, for children of divorced parents. The scheme itself had to do with consideration of the non-custodial parent's income, but the larger issue at stake here is the fact that the universities entered into a “cartel” in violation of antitrust laws. As this piece notes this is the “second major price-fixing antitrust lawsuit filed against highly selective universities since 2022, when 17 institutions…were accused of illegally colluding to set common financial aid formulas. So far, 10 of those institutions have settled for a combined $248 million.”8. Boeing has offered their striking machinists a new deal, which they hope will end their crippling strike. ABC reports “The new offer delivers a 35% raise over the four-year duration of the contract,” which is short of the 40% raise demanded by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers but considerably better than the aerospace titan's previous offer of 25%. ABC continues “The proposal also hikes Boeing's contribution to a 401(k) plan, but it declines to fulfill workers' call for a reinstatement of the company's defined pension.” As this piece notes, the machinists overwhelmingly rejected Boeing's previous offer last month; this week they will vote on the new proposal. Whatever the details of the final contract, this episode clearly demonstrates the power of a union, even going up against one of the most powerful corporations in America.9. A stunning CNN investigation reveals the extent of predatory fundraising by the major parties off of elderly people suffering from dementia or other forms of cognitive decline in their old age. According to “More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups… deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans…into giving away millions of dollars.” These heartbreaking stories concern “Donors…often in their 80s and 90s…[including] retired public workers, house cleaners and veterans, widows living alone, nursing home residents…[with] money…from pensions, Social Security payments and retirement savings accounts meant to last decades.” To cite just one just one shocking example: “[an] 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn't want to spend money on new ones, didn't realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”10. Finally, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has sent a letter to Rodney McMullen, Chairman and CEO of Kroger, decrying the company's “decision to roll out surge pricing using facial recognition technology.” Specifically, Tlaib cites concerns about price manipulation based on external factors like supply as well as discrimination based on race, gender, and other criteria determined through facial recognition. Tlaib ends this letter with six key questions, including “Will Kroger use…facial recognition to display targeted advertisements…?…What safeguards will be in pace?…[and] Are there plans to sell data collected in the store?” among others. Grocery prices continue to be a source of everyday economic hardship for working Americans and corporations are increasingly interested in surge pricing for essential goods. There is some comfort in knowing at least one member of Congress is concerned about this dangerous combination.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

On this episode of The Digital Patient, Dr. Joshua Liu, Co-founder & CEO of SeamlessMD, and marketing colleague, Alan Sardana, chat with Dr. Hannah Galvin, CMIO at Cambridge Health Alliance and Co-Founder at Shift Health Care Task Force, about "Equitable Interoperability, Making AI Scribes Work for Pediatrics, Building National Standards for Data Segmentation, and more..."

In this episode of the Life of Flow podcast, hosts dive deep into the cutting-edge world of limb salvage surgery with Dr. Michael Theodoulou, a podiatrist, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Chief of Foot and Ankle Surgery at Cambridge Health Alliance. Dr. Theodoulou introduces listeners to an innovative approach called distraction angiogenesis, which is helping patients with severe lower extremity conditions that have left them with "no option" for treatment. Dr. Theodoulou on the Impact of Distraction Angiogenesis:"We've seen significant improvements in blood flow and healing in patients with no other options. The angiogenesis response from controlled fractures can be remarkable." Hosts on the Future of Vascular Surgery:"There's a real intellectual curiosity here, and the results are exciting. Techniques like this could change how we approach limb salvage."

Discover holistic approaches to psychiatric healing. Your previous experience with conventional psychiatry likely consisted of suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals without considering you as a whole person. It's probable that there was little exploration of the power of the sacred to promote healing, which is especially crucial in our current climate of widespread fear and disconnection. In Sacred Psychiatry, you will be introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to healing. This book offers invaluable guidance on how to develop a personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. It illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine. Sacred Psychiatry also provides a holistic framework for weaning off of psychiatric pharmaceuticals and highlights treatable but frequently overlooked complex chronic conditions such as mold toxicity, mast cell activation syndrome, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, MD, is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance.

The Healthcare Facilities Network sat down with Alison Brisson, Vice President of Facilities and Support Services for Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, MA. Alison is running for the 2025 American Society of Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) Presidency. In this episode, we discuss Alison's thoughts and strategies on:* The recently held ASHE Innovation Conference* Her background and career path* Why she is running for the ASHE Presidency* Her proposed platform as President* Challenges and opportunities in healthcare facilities managementOur thanks to Alison for her time, and good luck to her in the election. Voting closes August 21.Check us out at https://cref.comOr send an email to pmartin@cref.com

Judy Tsafrir, MD, is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She has also found her life enriched by astrology, shamanism, and functional medicine.    Here Judy and Dawson share their perspectives on:  Judy's background Paying attention to all of the aspects of your being The roles of food, nutrition, metabolic health, high energy, sleep Why the body thrives on routines like consistently great diet and regular sleep How the body needs movement and it's stressed by being sedentary The importance of sunlight Environmental toxins Emotional Health Spiritual practice: meditation, prayer, gratitude, acts of service How the old world is dying, and a new world is being born The old world is based on the material world and the earth element The new world is air element much more quantum and ephemeral like VR Creative self-expression To reach Dr. Judy Tsafrir, her website is: https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/   To reach Dr. Dawson Church, his website is: https://dawsonchurch.com/   #mindtomatter #highenergyhealth #eft #meditation #sacredpsychiatry #blissbrain #holistic

Show Notes: Somava Saha's interest in medical school began late in her career. She studied molecular biology in her fourth year at Harvard, but she eventually enrolled in the Berkeley UCSF joint MediCal program. There, she learned about medicine from the perspective of people and cases, as well as the economics of medicine and the history of healthcare and public health. She also completed a master's thesis with the Bahai Community Health Partnership in Guyana, South America, where she worked alongside community health workers, villagers, and teachers to create conditions for collective healing. Somava explains the approach taken and how it led to significant health improvements, such as 90% reductions in malaria rates and elimination of acquired developmental delays.  Getting to Know the People Who Experience Homelessness  Somava also talks about the impact the Spare Change newspaper and getting to know the people experiencing homelessness in Harvard Square had on her and her career. She started to get involved in programs like Phillips Brooks House, and food recovery programs. By listening to the stories of people who were homeless, Somava found that there was an incredible wealth of human potential and people with enormous gifts to offer one another and others in creating communities. This experience taught her how to value the knowledge stored in stories, how to connect people's stories with policies, and see the gift in others as valuable tools for creating better change.  Community-driven Change Somava talks about her time at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance. She learned about the importance of community-driven change and how it can build social connections and change systems. During her residency training, Somava learned about the differences in structures and systems. She also encountered the challenges of supporting patients who had recently been assaulted. She talks about the process of collecting evidence and how this experience led to her belief in a model of seamless care that demonstrates true dignity and cultural competence is an important model to follow. She realized that the presence or absence of money does not determine whether systems work for people and communities experiencing inequities. Instead, it is the choices we make as a society and how structures and systems are designed to create a sense of dignity. Leading a Community Health Center Somava talks about leading a community health center in Revere, using the same lessons and methods as her life at Cambridge Health Alliance. Over the next two and a half years, the center became known as a national model, and she became elected as the next president of the medical staff. Somava went on to become the Vice President leading the care transformation in Massachusetts. The transformation focused on designing a system that works for people, giving dignity and agency, and valuing all workers based on their expertise, talents, gifts, and contributions. This transformation was chosen by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation as one for innovative and effective transformations in the country. Designing a Health System that Works Somava realized that health doesn't happen when someone goes into the doctor's office, but rather throughout life, leading to toxic stress and harmful outcomes. This led her to propose the 100 million healthier lives initiative, which built a global network across 30 countries and over 1850 partners reaching over 500 million people. In three and a half years, the network improved 738 million lives. She also founded Well Being and Equity in the World, focusing on changing the underlying conditions and root causes that perpetuate harm in people's lives, holding back their potential throughout their lifespan. A Progressive Medical Clinic Model Somava explains what made the Revere Clinic a progressive model and offers an example of how it worked for patients. The clinic created high-functioning teams to cater to the needs of the community, ensuring longer hours and safety appointments. The clinic recognized the importance of community members, such as medical assistants and receptionists, who could play a larger role than their technical capacity. Revere changed its financing model to focus on improving health and connecting with people throughout the year. They focussed on quality of care over quantity, building relationships, and supporting the patients. These approaches are just a few that were incorporated and prioritized preventative care, chronic disease management, and provided more time and coaching for individuals to work on their health and well-being goals.  Creating Well-being Initiatives Somava has worked with over 500 communities across the nation, including black, indigenous Latinx, and other communities, to create wellbeing initiatives designed by people closest to the problems. These initiatives saved over 60,000 years of life and helped communities of color, expunged prison records, and fed and housed the community back in their homes.She emphasizes the importance of understanding that those experiencing inequities have enormous gifts to offer the nation and that it is a loss is when we prevent them from expressing their genius. A Mission to Advance Well-being Somava's mission is to advance intergenerational well-being and equity based on racial and economic justice. She talks about methods employed to create pathways for intergenerational health building and community building, including the Well Being in the Nation network, which connects the dots across organizations and provides support in multiple ways. Many of their initiatives and frameworks have been adopted by organizations and federal agencies.  The most important part of their work is building community, and building change agents who can create better change. They have worked with organizations like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the CDC, and the Surgeon General to build capacity in the public health system and to create a network of change agents. Influential Harvard Courses and Professors Somava mentions professor Diana Ecks on World Religions, and courses Lessons Learned from the Weimar Republic, Medical Anthropology Timestamps: 05:17 Healthcare, poverty, and social connection 10:18 Homelessness, poverty, and healthcare 18:11 Improving healthcare systems for marginalized communities 24:05 Transforming healthcare through community-centered approaches 28:45 Healthcare system redesign for better patient outcomes 36:43 Improving diabetes care through patient-led groups 40:56 Trusting patients' knowledge for health and wellness 46:07 Building collective leadership for health equity Links: Website:  https://weintheworld.org/ Featured Non-profit: The featured non-profit of this episode is CAPE, recommended by Melinda Hsu Taylor who reports: “Hi, this is Melinda Hsu from the class of 1992. And this week's featured organization is the coalition of Asian Pacific's in entertainment. They're a group that's been around for about 30 years in Hollywood, fostering and Amplifying Voices from the creative side from the industry talent side, all from the Asian Pacific Islander native Hawaiian community. And I'm very pleased to have been involved with many of their outreach programs and the Asian American writers brunch, as well as the mentoring program that they have through not just the cape writers fellowship, but also the showrunner incubator, which I'm helping launch this year. And I hope that you will look up their website which is Cape usa.org To find out more about the work they do the initiatives and also the screenings and the kind of like programs that they do to let people know about what films are coming out and how to support them and how to get involved with all of these things. And now here is Will Bachman and this week's episode.” To learn more about their work visit: CapeUSA.org

Public Health Careers podcast episode with Pat Leomi, MPH

Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, MD, is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She is author of … Continue reading "Psychiatry and the Soul with Judy Tsafrir"

For far too many, their experience with conventional psychiatry likely consisted of suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals, all without being considered as a whole person. It's probable that there is little exploration of the power of the sacred to promote healing, which is especially crucial in our current climate of widespread fear and disconnection. In psychiatrist Judy Tsafrir ‘s “Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness”, the reader is introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to psychiatric healing. It offers invaluable guidance on how to develop personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. Moreover, it illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine. Judy Tsafrir, MD is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts.  She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance.  Although thoroughly trained in the conventional allopathic approach to psychiatric care, she no longer endorses it, and in fact, believes that it causes harm.  The multi-modal approach she makes use of with her patients integrates her conventional training in adult and child psychiatry and psychoanalysis with functional medicine and Eastern medicine, ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP), archetypal psychology and trauma work, shamanism, energy healing, homeopathy and spiritual herbalism, astrology, the Tarot, and her commitment to Sacred activism. Find out more at https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/

For far too many, their experience with conventional psychiatry likely consisted of suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals, all without being considered as a whole person. It's probable that there is little exploration of the power of the sacred to promote healing, which is especially crucial in our current climate of widespread fear and disconnection.In psychiatrist Judy Tsafrir ‘s “Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness”, the reader is introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to psychiatric healing. It offers invaluable guidance on how to develop personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. Moreover, it illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine.Judy Tsafrir, MD is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts.  She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance.  Although thoroughly trained in the conventional allopathic approach to psychiatric care, she no longer endorses it, and in fact, believes that it causes harm.  The multi-modal approach she makes use of with her patients integrates her conventional training in adult and child psychiatry and psychoanalysis with functional medicine and Eastern medicine, ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP), archetypal psychology and trauma work, shamanism, energy healing, homeopathy and spiritual herbalism, astrology, the Tarot, and her commitment to Sacred activism.Find out more at https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sacred Psychiatry; Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness with Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, MD In Sacred Psychiatry, you will be introduced to a diverse range of holistic approaches to healing. This book offers invaluable guidance on how to develop a personal spiritual practice and highlights the profound significance of fulfilling the soul's purpose. It illustrates the usefulness of astrology, emphasizes how toxic relationships undermine healing, and showcases the remarkable healing power of food as medicine. Sacred Psychiatry also provides a holistic framework for weaning off of psychiatric pharmaceuticals and highlights treatable but frequently overlooked complex chronic conditions such as mold toxicity, mast cell activation syndrome, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, MD, is a holistic healer with a private psychiatry and psychoanalysis practice in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. To learn more about Judy visit: www.judytsafrirmd.com *************************************************** For more information about BITEradio products and services visit: http://www.biteradio.me/index.html To view the photography of Robert at: http://rpsharpe.com/

Randi Sokol. MD, MPH, MMedEd, joins us to outline how passionate family medicine practitioners can provide evidence-based care that meets the needs of patients affected by opioid use disorder. Dr Sokol shares that practitioners do not need to know everything about addiction medicine to offer comprehensive, compassionate care, and she offers resources to help those seeking training or mentorship. Our host and guest emphasize the importance of quality training for the next generation of family docs coming through residency programs, and share additional resources for those working with residents. Hosted by Saria Saccocio, MD, MHA, FAAFPCopyright © Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, 2024Resources:STFM Addiction Medicine Curriculum Providers Clinical Support System (PCCS) Homepage Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) AAFP New Training Requirement for Controlled Substance Rx: Answers to Common QuestionsAAFP New DEA Training Requirement: Who has to do it, and how to get it doneGuest Bio:Randi Sokol, MD, MPH, MMedEd, is an Assistant Professor at the Tufts Family Medicine Residency Program and Instructor at Harvard Medical School.  She is Board Certified in both Family Medicine and Addiction Medicine.  She earned her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania, her Medical Degree and Masters in Public Health from Tulane University, completed Family Medicine Residency at UC-Davis, and earned a Masters in Medical Education through the University of Dundee.At the Tufts Family Medicine Residency Program, Dr. Sokol is involved in clinical work, teaching, research, and advocacy, specifically around vulnerable populations that struggle with substance abuse and mental health issues.  She is the Program Director for the Tufts Addiction Medicine Fellowship at Cambridge Health Alliance. She serves as the Director of the pain and addiction curriculum for residents, runs the Addiction Elective for Tufts medical students, and has developed a National Addiction Curriculum for Family Medicine Residency Programs across the country. Dr. Sokol has special interest in providing group visits as venue for treating patients with opioid use disorder (known as “GBOT”): She started group visits at her clinic that have now been running for 9 years, has published numerous research articles on this topic helping coin the “GBOT” term in the medical literature, and she mentors other clinical sites in implementing this model of care. She previously served as a PCSS-certified to trains providers to become Buprenorphine waivered (before the X waiver requirement was removed). She also runs a consultation service that supports primary care providers in caring for patients with pain and addiction.  Additionally, she has particular expertise around medical education, has served on a national committee for Graduate Medical Education, she is the Director of Faculty Development at her residency program and has published numerous research articles related to how people learn. In her free time, Dr. Sokol is an avid exerciser, enjoys spending time with her geriatric rescue dog, and is a “Big Sister” in the “Big/Little Sister” program.Link:stfm.org/stfmpodcast032024 

In this episode Natalie talks with Dr. Martha Sweezy, author of the book "Internal Family Systems Therapy for Shame and Guilt".   Topics Discussed Include: 1. Martha's journey to IFS: The missing piece to the paradigm 2. What is guilt 3. Maladaptive vs. Adaptive guilt 4. Survivor guilt, separation guilt, mom guilt, anticipatory guilt 5. What is shame 6. External shaming vs. Internal shaming 7. Shame cycle 8. Can shame every be useful or healing   Martha Sweezy, PhD, is an assistant professor, part-time, in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a research and training consultant at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and a psychotherapist with an online private practice. She teaches Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy nationally and internationally. Her most recent book is Internal Family Systems Therapy for Shame and Guilt. She has also co-authored five other books on IFS, co-edited two books on various applications of IFS, and published two peer-reviewed articles on IFS.   Martha Sweezy: Website: https://marthasweezy.com/ Publications: https://marthasweezy.com/publications/   Natalie Deering: Website: https://www.ndwellnessservices.com/ Contact: https://www.ndwellnessservices.com/contact Instagram: @nataliedeering   Interested in sponsoring an episode of the podcast? Upgrade your business and let more people know about your amazing services or products by reaching hundreds to thousands of people by sponsoring an episode for only $100!  Please email ndwellness.services@therapysecure.com for more information.  Thank you for the support!    *Please support the podcast by following, rating, and leaving a review*    

Why You Should Listen:  In this episode, you will learn about "Sacred Psychiatry" and healing through the integration of heart, mind, body, soul, the biosphere, and the cosmos. About My Guests: My guest for this episode is Dr. Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir.  Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, MD, is a holistic healer, activist, artist, and gardener with a private practice of holistic psychiatry, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and psychoanalysis located in Newton, Massachusetts.  She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance.  She has particular interest in combining spiritual and developmental approaches to healing, helping patients wean from psychiatric medications, and treating complex chronic medical conditions that present psychiatrically, including mold toxicity, mast cell activation, and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.  She is a practitioner of a variety of energy healing and esoteric modalities including astrology, Tarot, Shamanism, Body Intuitive, and Reiki.  Spiritually, she is drawn to Animism, Kabbalah, Buddhism, Taoism, Wicca, and Quakerism.  Her practice is dedicated to healing through the integration of heart, mind, body, soul, the biosphere, and the cosmos.  Key Takeaways: Why does allopathic medicine fail with chronic health conditions? What is the connection between autoimmunity, inflammation, and psychiatric conditions? Might attempting to improve our health be working against our "heavenly mandate"? What are some practical things that can be done to foster connectedness? Can acupuncture act as a connector to the spiritual realm? How might rose and geranium essential oils support the limbic system? Is there a place for psychedelics such as Ketamine in supporting mental health? What foods contribute to neuroinflammation? How do energy vampires promote sympathetic dominance? How much of a focus on regaining health should be in the mental / emotional realm vs. the physical realm? How important is working on the limbic system? What is the connection between MCAS and mental, emotional, or limbic health? Has COVID been another contributor to psychiatric conditions? Does EMF play a role in chronic illness? How often does mold exposure contribute to psychiatric conditions? Do patients with EDS improve their symptoms with treatment? How is autonomic dysfunction assessed and addressed? What is the role of LDN in the clinical toolbox? Connect With My Guest:  http://JudyTsafrirMD.com Related Resources:  Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness Interview Date: December 13, 2023 Transcript: To review a transcript of this show, visit https://BetterHealthGuy.com/Episode194. Additional Information: To learn more, visit https://BetterHealthGuy.com. Disclaimer:  The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority. 

This episode features Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, President & Chief Medical Officer at Cambridge Health Alliance Physician Organization. Here, he discusses his organization, population health, the importance of putting the patient first, how he is focusing on opening up access to care, and more.This episode is brought to you by R1 RCM, a leading provider of technology-driven solutions that transform the financial performance of hospitals, health systems, and medical groups. R1 delivers proven, scalable operating models that power sustainable improvements to net patient revenue, while reducing operating costs. To learn how you can build a future-ready revenue cycle today, visit us at www.r1rcm.com/beckers 

Having a waiting list of 20,000 people to take your training is a pretty good sign you're onto something important. That's the mixed blessing Dr. Richard Schwartz faces as interest in Internal Family Systems -- an innovative therapeutic approach to trauma and other mental disorders he developed -- continues to grow. The “family” in this case are the multiple parts of a person's psyche that, in Schwartz's view, need to listen to each other in order for people to overcome traumas and function well. “This is an alternative paradigm for understanding all kinds of what are seen as mental illnesses. Part of my goal is to bring this different perspective to all of these things that have been so medicalized,” he explains to host Shiv Gaglani.  A welcome discovery of IFS is that among the parts, there is a core Self that can't be damaged and knows how to heal. As Schwartz explains it, IFS therapy works by opening enough space for the Self to pop out and start relating to, and leading, the other parts that may be critical, protective or play other roles. Don't miss this fascinating look at an evidence-based therapeutic approach that challenges conventional thinking and offers hope to patients with a long history of struggle. "There are many heavily diagnosed people who feel hugely relieved to know they're not sick."Mentioned in this episode: https://ifs-institute.com/

Judy Tsafrir's website: https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/ Judy's book (to be published January 2024): Sacred Psychiatry JUDY SUZANNE REIS TSAFRIR, MD, is a holistic healer, activist, artist, and gardener with a private practice of holistic psy- chiatry and psychoanalysis located in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a board-certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She has particular interest in combining spiritual and developmental approaches to healing, helping patients wean from psychiatric medications, and treating complex chronic medical conditions that present psychiatri- cally, including mold toxicity, mast cell activation, and Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome. Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is also offered in her practice. She is a practitioner of a variety of energy healing and esoteric modalities, including astrology, tarot, Shamanism, BodyIn- tuitive, and Reiki. Spiritually, she is drawn to Animism, Kabbalah, Buddhism, Taoism, and Quakerism. Her practice is dedicated to heal- ing through the integration of heart, mind, body, soul, the biosphere, and the cosmos. Heather's website: https://www.risingmoonhealingcenter.com

In this episode of BackTable ENT, Dr. Gopi Shah and Dr. Ayesha Khalid, rhinologist with Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, discuss balloon sinuplasty indications, techniques, and post-operative management. --- CHECK OUT OUR SPONSOR Stryker ENT https://ent.stryker.com --- SHOW NOTES First, Ayesha reviews the history of balloon sinuplasty. Originally used in cardiology, otolaryngologists adopted balloons as a less-invasive option to widen sinus ostia. Over time, balloon sinuplasty transitioned from being an operative procedure to one that can be done in-office with select patients. In Ayesha's experience, facial pain and nasal stuffiness are the symptoms most responsive to balloon sinuplasty. Then, the conversation shifts to application of balloon technology. Rather than thinking about balloon procedures and traditional functional sinus surgery as mutually exclusive, Ayesha sees them as complementary tools. Patients with straightforward sinusitis or barotrauma often improve with an in-office balloon procedure and sinus rinses. When scheduling an in-office balloon procedure, Ayesha counsels on the odds of success (over seventy percent) and possible need for further surgery. For example, patients with polyp disease might be better suited to a more traditional sinus surgery. Even in these cases, Ayesha uses balloons to widen ostia, as they inflict less trauma than traditional sinus instrumentation. Ayesha then walks listeners through her preparation for and performance of an in-office balloon procedure. Finally, Ayesha fits balloon sinuplasty into the larger context of sinusitis treatment. She emphasizes the importance of sinus rinses for sinusitis patients both pre-and post-operatively. She sees patients one week, one month, and then three months following any balloon procedure. Depending on the nature of their disease, patients sometimes require steroids or biologics after their balloon, but most report improvement of their sinus symptoms. Ayesha leaves listeners with advice on expanding one's procedural toolkit as a practicing ENT.

In this episode, Dr. Stephen Sternbach (Harvard Medical School; Cambridge Health Alliance; member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and of the École freudienne du Québec) speaks of his journey into psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and also literature as a space to explore the encounter with the Real. Sternbach discusses the changing relationship to psychoanalysis in psychiatric education and practice over the past decades in the United States. He touches on the concept of the defect in language in Willy Apollon's metapsychology, and concludes by sharing his aesthetic experience with a Wordsworth poem. 

Immersion into cultural humility needs curiosity, addresses power dynamics, embraces failure, meditates on self-critique, & fosters respectful relationships. About the Show Welcome to Health Hats, learning on the journey toward best health. I am Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged, old, cisgender, white man with privilege, living in a food oasis, who can afford many hats and knows a little about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. Most people wear hats one at a time, but I wear them all at once.  I'm the Rosetta Stone of Healthcare. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life's realities in the awesome circus of healthcare.  Let's make some sense of all this. We respect Listeners, Watchers, and Readers. Show Notes at the end. Watch on YouTube Read Newsletter The same content as the podcast but not a verbatim transcript. Could be a book chapter with images. Download the printable transcript here Contents Table of Contents Toggle About the ShowWatch on YouTubeRead NewsletterContentsEpisodeProemPodcast introCultural competenceCultural sensitivityHealthcare, a product not delivered aloneNot the same person foreverCuriosity in not knowingReading the room, getting it wrongSelf-reflection and self-critiqueNot interacting with a statueRedress the power imbalanceCall to actionWhat about emerging adults?Person-centered approach to cultural identityTeenagers and cultural humility: ListenRelationship dyads and triadsCultural humility for the clinicianHumility in the relationship, power dynamicProviders, hang out on social media feeds where your patients hang outReflectionPodcast OutroProduction TeamOther CreditsLinks and referencesDisclaimerRelated podcastsCreative Commons Licensing Episode Proem Image created on DALL.E Something is missing. I'm not yet ready to conclude this series on emerging adults with mental illness. In the next and last episode, I'll dive for pearls in the fifteen episodes published over the past ten months. What's nagging at me? Each guest spoke from the culture they knew and the cultures in which they received or offered treatment and service. I need an episode about how people can approach, be curious about, and be open to the cultures they experience. Is this cultural competence or sensitivity or what? I sought experts working with a kaleidoscope of cultures—first, Jamila Xible, a previous guest and community health worker with Cambridge Health Alliance. Jamila blows my socks off whenever Photo taken by Thyla Jane PhD on UnSplash I speak with her. Next, my friend and previous guest, Kiame Mahaniah, referred me to Catherine Smail, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Lynn Community Health Center. Cat is a clinician therapist and the Associate Director of Training for Behavioral Health. Erika Malik at the Innovation and Value Initiative referred me to Theresa Nguyen, Ph.D., who has a social work background at Mental Health America. Theresa primarily does research and runs their screening program of youth coming onto the internet to solve problems for the first time. Hang on. Here we go. I learned a ton. Podcast intro Welcome to Health Hats, the Podcast. I'm Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged cisgender old white man of privilege who knows a little bit about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life's realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let's make some sense of all of this. Cultural competence Health Hats: Let's discuss cultural competence, sensitivity, and humility. How do cultural humility, sensitivity, and competence come into the team sport of best health? We'll dwell here briefly, hearing all three guests speak in depth. Catherine Smail: Cultural competence came about in the eighties, a first attempt to start grappling in a new way with the disparate health outcomes that providers saw in their immigrant populations. They tried to understand why that was happening and how ...

Dr. Kevin Coughlin, Medical Director of the new Neurodevelopmental Disorders Unit of Cambridge Health Alliance talks about his experiences setting up this unit to fill a crucial gap in treatment for ASD youth—and talks about the roots of his interest in ASD

High Reliability, The Healthcare FM Podcast is brought to you by Gosselin/Martin Associates. Our show discusses the issues, challenges, and opportunities within the Facilities Management (FM) function. The  High Reliability Podcast discusses Human Resources in this presentation. Human Resources can be like the Wizard behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. To demystify, we asked Joy Curtis, Chief Human Resources Officer, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, MA, to join us. Joy provides a helpful and illuminating description of the challenges faced in the market today in healthcare. Through our conversation, Joy offers insights on:The challenges of recruiting, regretted turnover, employee education, and retention;The first rule of recruiting;Where have all the employees gone;The use of Artificial Intelligence in HR;Interviewing best practices; Arrogance versus confidence The issue of using too many "I's" in an interview. Joy's discussion will benefit healthcare facilities management professionals and all other professionals, regardless of industry. Thanks for listening!Check out the Healthcare Facilities NetworkCheck us out at https://gosselin-associates.com

Today, I sit down with Dr. Arundhati Ghosh, a great friend of Signet's, to talk about her journey in medicine, and how she advises students interested in pursuing the medical path. This episode is a must listen for any parents and students thinking about this path! Dr. Arundhati Ghosh currently works at the Cambridge Health Alliance, Department of Surgery, Harvard Medical School, and is the surgery curriculum director for the Harvard Medical School Cambridge Integrated Clerkship. She does innovative work in curriculum development and teaching methods. Her most recent publication is 'Structuring Medical Education for Workforce Transformation: Continuity, Symbiosis, and Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships'. Follow Dr. Arundhati Gosh on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arundhati-ghosh-7454126/To get in touch with Dr. Ghosh, email her at arundhati@medicineadvisory.orgAccess free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

Having worked in community mental health at the outpatient department of the Cambridge Health Alliance for 18 years as a therapist, supervisor and the associate director of the DBT program, Martha Sweezy experienced with a wide variety of mental health challenges, many related to the sequelae of trauma. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a clinical and program development consultant at Cambridge Health Alliance. Until January, 2015, Martha was the Associate Director and Director of Training of DBT at Cambridge Health Alliance. In addition to being the author of several articles, Martha is a co-editor or co-author of eight books related to IFS (see Publications), and co-leads (with Toni Herbine-Blank) workshops for IFS trained therapists on shame and self-compassion, fondly nicknamed “Shame Camp” by participants. Martha has an online private practice.

Dan kicked off the show with an examination and exploration of today's top stories with various experts and reporters. Joining the program was Stephen Rich, Dir. of the New England Regional Center of Vector-Borne Diseases and Microbiology Professor at UMass Amherst, Boston NAACP President Tanisha Sullivan, Accuweather Senior Meteorologist Brian Thompson, Dr. Pieter Cohen, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Cambridge Health Alliance.

In this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and queer subjects. Pushing up against static notions of “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pellegrini argue for the ethical urgency of recognizing that gender emerges from complex processes of “self-theorization.” This brave new work invites radical new ways for working with gender diversity psychoanalytically. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and queer subjects. Pushing up against static notions of “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pellegrini argue for the ethical urgency of recognizing that gender emerges from complex processes of “self-theorization.” This brave new work invites radical new ways for working with gender diversity psychoanalytically. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and queer subjects. Pushing up against static notions of “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pellegrini argue for the ethical urgency of recognizing that gender emerges from complex processes of “self-theorization.” This brave new work invites radical new ways for working with gender diversity psychoanalytically. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and queer subjects. Pushing up against static notions of “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pellegrini argue for the ethical urgency of recognizing that gender emerges from complex processes of “self-theorization.” This brave new work invites radical new ways for working with gender diversity psychoanalytically. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and queer subjects. Pushing up against static notions of “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pellegrini argue for the ethical urgency of recognizing that gender emerges from complex processes of “self-theorization.” This brave new work invites radical new ways for working with gender diversity psychoanalytically. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Both the state and federal COVID-19 public health emergencies recently expired, as vaccination rates rise and infection rates decline. Health officials say this doesn't mean COVID is no longer a concern - merely that it's made its way into an endemic phase. The Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity says many people who have disabilities or are immunocompromised feel like they're being overlooked, left behind, and put in danger with the ending of the public health emergencies.Two members of the Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity join the show this week to talk with Nichole about their concerns: Lara Jirmanus, a physician at Cambridge Health Alliance, and Colin Killick, the Executive Director of the Disability Policy Consortium.

Show Notes: Ruth Hertzman-Miller, a member of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992, graduated with a degree in biology and went on to a career in medicine, completing a residency in internal medicine at Cambridge City Hospital and a fellowship in health services research in Los Angeles. After returning to the Boston area, she worked as a physician at Cambridge Health Alliance and then at NewBridge, a retirement community. Ruth discussed her journey since graduating, reflecting on the unexpected twists and turns it has taken. Ruth made the difficult decision to switch from medicine to music four or five years ago. She took catch up courses at a conservatory in Boston and is now doing a master's in composition. Ruth is a pianist and choral singer and was inspired to pursue music again when her seven year old daughter joined North Cambridge Family Opera. An Education and Career in Medicine She didn't know what she wanted to do with her life when she went to college, but her dad and grandfather were both psychiatrists, so she figured she'd take some premed courses and see what happened since she liked science and helping people, but she also got to take electives in other subjects like music. In medical school at Case Western, she was interested in the clinical aspects of the program where she was assigned to a pregnant woman and followed her through delivery and the baby's first year of life, but along the way, she had many doubts about how much she wanted to be in the program.  At the end of her internship year, she went to her residency director and was considering quitting, but he talked her into staying.  Balancing Family Life and Work After the birth of her first child, she found it difficult to focus on both the intense schedule of work and study and family, but she finished her master's and eventually made the decision to pursue a master's in music and wrap up her medical career. Ruth balanced work and motherhood for many decades. Initially, she worked at Cambridge Health Alliance and then various medical but non-clinical jobs such as the Joslin Diabetes Clinic and the Hearst Company, and then at EBSCO Publishing. While she was in non-clinical positions, she worked clinically one day a week at Cambridge Health Alliance and then at various sites within Hebrew Rehab, finally landing at the NewBridge retirement community. When she decided to cut down on her work and dedicate more time to music, she kept her one day a week job at Hebrew Rehab and started studying for a certificate in music. Studying Musical Composition and Theory Ruth discusses her experience studying composition and writing music and what was included in  the coursework. As a composer, she is interested in exploring the form of music. She studies what has been done in the past, the many options and choices available, and considers how she can create something new. She refers to Mozart and Haydn, who approached their compositions differently and how they did so. Ruth is not expecting to make a professional career out of her work, as it is difficult for a composer to make money, but instead, is more interested in exploring new forms and having her work performed. Video game music and film music are some of the biggest markets for composers; however, Ruth is not particularly interested in these areas. She is more interested in writing for small ensembles such as string quartets, for which she can find performers without much difficulty. She also talks about the place of AI in composing music, and how it can provide inspiration but needs human intervention to create a finished product.  The Creative Process of Composing Music When asked if composing music feels three-dimensional, or if it has different mental qualities, Ruth answers that this is subjective and depends on the individual, but it is likely that the experience of composing music entails a combination of physical and mental elements. It requires both the ability to think in abstract terms, as well as the creative ability to visualize and construct musical ideas. It is a process that is both intuitive and analytical, where the creative elements of music are balanced with the technical aspects of composition. Ruth talks about the creative process behind composition. She explains that she typically has a broad idea, such as writing a piano piece with two players starting at opposite ends of the piano, and then breaks it down into smaller details such as melody and harmony. She then works on generating variations on the material and figuring out the logical progression of the piece. She explains that she usually isn't trying to express something that can be explained in words, but rather it is usually a feeling or an exploration of the music itself. She uses the example of a recent project to explain the process. Ruth also  talks about conveying emotions through music. For some pieces of music, the goal is to introduce the theme to the audience and have them understand it through the different changes in the music. At the opposite end of this, there is writing an opera scene where the focus is more on portraying the emotions. Professors and Courses of Influence Favorite professors and courses from Harvard include Luise Vosgerchian's course on the Development of the String Quartet and John Stewart's course on Introductory Music Theory. She also talks about her more recent professor, Lyle Davidson, who happens to be in the same tradition of Luise Vosgerchian. Other favorite courses include Biology of Fishes with Karel Liem, Scientific Ethics with George Whitesides, Moral Reasoning with Thomas Scanlon, and Marjorie Garber on Shakespeare. Timestamps: 01:41 Pursuing Music After a Career in Medicine  05:19 Motivation and Commitment During Medical School  09:57 Medical Training and Fellowship  16:28 The Process of Studying Composition  20:28 Composing and Making a Career in Music 25:32 Reading and Generative AI in Music Composition  28:03 Exploring the Creative Process of Composing Music 36:05 Music Study and Harvard College Professors  Links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ruthhertzman-miller3349/videos

High Reliability, The Healthcare FM Podcast is brought to you by Gosselin/Martin Associates. Our show discusses the issues, challenges, and opportunities within the Facilities Management (FM) function.  In this episode of High Reliability,  we have excerpted an episode of the Healthcare Facilities Network. This YouTube Network, created by Gosselin/Martin Associates,   aims to increase awareness that the rewarding and stable career of healthcare facility management is open and available to all. However, an influx of new professionals is needed, from the trades to the management level. So in today's podcast, we ask a straightforward question: What does a Healthcare Facility Manager do? The answer is simple: A lot!Now a 35-minute conversation cannot convey all of their responsibility, there are some significant areas we did not even touch on, but you will get a sense of scale and scope. And if you are presently working in healthcare facilities management, from the trades to the CSuite, you will benefit from listening to our guests:* Alison Brisson, Vice President of Facilities & Support Services, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, MA;* Robert Hacker, Director of Facilities & Planning, Design, and Construction, Community Memorial Health System, Ventura, CAAdditionally, Alison's path from hospitality to facilities management and Robert's path from the military to healthcare facilities management may be instructive for others to follow.  Please share this podcast and tell people that great careers exist in healthcare facilities management, from the trades to leadership.  Thanks to Alison and Robert for their time and insights.https://www.youtube.com/@HealthcareFacilitiesNetwork@HealthcareFacilitiesNetwork @CambHealthAlliance @my_cmhCheck us out at https://gosselin-associates.com

Maria Kossilos, Assoc. Chief Pharmacy Officer at Cambridge Health Alliance, joins Kristin Fox-Smith (340B ACE), Managing Director at Visante, to discuss how pharmaceutical manufacturer restrictions – some as recent as last week – put enormous financial pressure on health systems and covered entities who are doing what they can to care for vulnerable and underserved patients across America.   Kossilos and Fox-Smith describe why the 340B outlook is somewhat bleak, as the fear of continuing to lose 340B savings could well become a reality in the coming 18-24 months. However, they also describe real solutions such as utilizing 340B ESP in ways to leverage data in exchange for 340B price restoration, where possible. Fox-Smith describes Cambridge Health Alliance as the perfect case study for an organization that has figured out what works well, how to hold vendors accountable, and how to stay on top of ever-changing restrictions and requirements while restoring lost revenue without draining its internal resources.   In this episode, you will hear from two leading 340B experts who are passionate about taking care of patients – especially those that cannot afford it themselves – and advocating for the organizations on the front lines. Jim Jorgenson, Visante CEO, moderates the discussion and provides insight into the legal aspects and impact on the future of the program.

A new report finds Massachusetts storms have grown in frequency and severity since the early 1900s. The number of intense, two-day storms has increased by 74% — and that means many homes are becoming more vulnerable to flooding. "The first thing that comes to my mind is the health implication of this," said Dr. Gaurab Basu, co-director of the Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy at Cambridge Health Alliance. "Concern about water damage in homes that could cause mold, which of course will cause people to have serious allergies. We want our homes to be safe and protected, and so the idea that climate could impact the health of our children within our home is concerning." And across New England, where many of the country's oldest buildings are located, some cities have begun preparing for the worst of climate change — by picking up historic buildings and moving them. "Look, we're going to make choices. Maybe it's not so important to save a [particular] historic house -- but maybe to save another one," said Beth Daley, editor and general manager of The Conversation, U.S. "I think the emphasis should really be on changing FEMA and flood insurance laws... These kind of incentives need to be geared toward retreat or relocation." But a United Nations panel says we can still keep the worst effects of climate change at bay, if industrialized countries can cooperate in cutting global greenhouse gasses in half by 2030. Cabell Eames, political director of Better Future Project, told Under the Radar that Massachusetts is making significant progress against climate change: "We have the first Climate Chief in Massachusetts and I know she is working diligently with the state of Massachusetts... There's just so much good will out there and there's so much opportunity to build relationship with one another and build community, and I think that when we do that everything else will just fall into place." A panel of experts discuss these stories and more for our Environmental News Roundtable. GUESTS Dr. Gaurab Basu, physician, co-director of the Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy at Cambridge Health Alliance, and Health Equity Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Beth Daley, editor and general manager of The Conversation, U.S. Cabell Eames, political director of Better Future Project, a Massachusetts-based grassroots climate action organization

Thoughtfulness, frustration, and caring of PCP, Dr. Bonnie Engelbart managing referral, consultation, and stretching resources but still, not enough bodies. Blog subscribers: Listen to the podcast here. Scroll down through show notes to read the post. Subscribe to Health Hats, the Podcast, on your favorite podcast player This episode can be watched on YouTube Episode Notes Prefer to read, experience impaired hearing or deafness? Find FULL TRANSCRIPT at the end of the other show notes or download the printable transcript here Contents with Time-Stamped Headings to listen where you want to listen or read where you want to read (heading. time on podcast xx:xx. page # on the transcript) Proem.. 1 Podcast intro 01:26. 2 Health is fragile 02:00. 2 Primary care practice at Cambridge Health Alliance 05:31. 3 Screening for mental illness 06:29. 3 The referral maze 08:10. 3 Team building 11:40. 4 Toll on staff 14:02. 4 The burden of stigma, lack of resources, barriers to continuity 14:41. 5 Need more bodies 17:00. 5 Care partners 18:31. 5 A word from our sponsor, Abridge 19:27. 6 Complex time 20:09. 6 Changes over the past twenty years 21:27. 6 Self-medication 22:56. 7 Questions for emerging adults 24:03. 7 Questions for administrators 25:27. 7 The burden of cost to families 27:19. 7 Culture and language 28:09. 8 Reflection 30:35. 8 Next #7 Emergency medicine: We're not trained for this 32:25. 9 Podcast Outro 33:02. 9 Please comment and ask questions at the comment section at the bottom of the show notes on LinkedIn  via email YouTube channel  DM on Instagram, Twitter, Mastadon to @healthhats Credits Music on intro and outro by permission from Joey van Leeuwen, Drummer, Composer, Arranger including Moe's Blues for Proem and Reflection Web and Social Media Coach, Dissemination Kayla Nelson @lifeoflesion Intro photo of Vulture Couple by Rich Rieger used with permission Photo of Swaziland by Ndumiso Silindza on Unsplash Images of emerging adult with mental illness and community collaboration from DALL.E The views and opinions presented in this podcast and publication are solely my responsibility and do not necessarily represent the views of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute®  (PCORI®), its Board of Governors, or Methodology Committee. Danny van Leeuwen (Health Hats) Sponsored by Abridge Inspired by and grateful to Laura Zucker, Mike Herndon, Sue Donnelley, Luc Pelletier   Links World Health Organization (WHO) Adolescent Mental Health Most mental health concerns, especially for emerging adults, first present in primary care, placing them in a critical role for addressing these concerns. The PSC-17 Pediatric System Checklist is a brief questionnaire that helps identify and assess changes in emotional and behavioral problems in children When kids turn 18, we transition to a form called the AWQ, Cambridge Health Alliance Adult Wellbeing Scale, which screens for depression, anxiety, and substance use. National Alliance of Mental Health: Kids, Teens, and Young Adults, White House Fact Sheet: Improving Access and Care for Youth Mental Health and Substance Abuse Conditions, American Academy of Family Practice (AAFP) article, Managing Behavioral Health Issues in Primary Care: Six Five-Minute Tools. Related podcasts Series: Emerging Adults with Mental Illness Pediatric Transition to Adult Care | Danny van Leeuwen Health Hats (health-hats.com) About the Show Welcome to Health Hats, learning on the journey toward best health. I am Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged, old, cisgender, white man with privilege, living in a food oasis, who can afford many hats and knows a little about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. Most people wear hats one at a time, but I wear them all at once.  I'm the Rosetta Stone of Healthcare. We will listen and learn about what it takes to ad...

On this episode, J.J. Mull speaks with Richard Billow and Tzachi Slonim about Richard M. Billow's Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis and Group Process: Changing Our Minds (Routledge, 2021). This volume presents Billow's unique contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalytic group therapy, along with introductions and explications by Slonim, the volume's editor. Weaving together various theoretical traditions and thinkers (Bion, Laplanche, the relational school, etc.), Billow extends and complicates what we ordinarily think of as constituting the “relational” in psychodynamic group work. In addition to these theoretical contributions, what remains most alive in the book is its fidelity to clinical experience. Throughout the book, vivid clinical vignettes give us a window into the dynamic, unfolding process of a clinician at work. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

On this episode, J.J. Mull speaks with Richard Billow and Tzachi Slonim about Richard M. Billow's Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis and Group Process: Changing Our Minds (Routledge, 2021). This volume presents Billow's unique contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalytic group therapy, along with introductions and explications by Slonim, the volume's editor. Weaving together various theoretical traditions and thinkers (Bion, Laplanche, the relational school, etc.), Billow extends and complicates what we ordinarily think of as constituting the “relational” in psychodynamic group work. In addition to these theoretical contributions, what remains most alive in the book is its fidelity to clinical experience. Throughout the book, vivid clinical vignettes give us a window into the dynamic, unfolding process of a clinician at work. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This episode was recorded in 2021. Dr. Ron Siegel is an Assistant Professor of Psychology, part time, at Harvard Medical School, where he has taught for over 35 years. He is a long-time student of mindfulness meditation and serve on the Board of Directors and faculty of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and the faculties of the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches internationally about mind-body medicine and the application of mindfulness and compassion practices in psychotherapy and other fields. His clinical career has included working with low-income children and families, treating adults with chronic pain and other stress-related disorders, and providing mindfulness-oriented psychotherapy. He currently maintains a limited private clinical practice in Massachusetts.

“It's one of the real tragic mythologies of our culture – this crazy fantasy that real winners are just non-stop on top… it's completely impossible.” – Dr Ronald Siegel  ***********************************************  SUPPORT DR. AMY ROBBINS:  If you're enjoying the podcast and finding value in guest interviews, ghost stories, and the content I share, please consider supporting the show by becoming a Patreon member for as little as $5 a month at Patreon.com/DrAmyRobbins  As a member you'll get more say in the content we cover and exclusive access to behind-the-scenes goodness!   Stay Connected with Dr. Amy Robbins:  Facebook Instagram YouTube Website   ***********************************************  EPISODE SUMMARY:  Have you ever felt jealousy, stress or even anger on social media, but you keep right on scrolling? What about feelings of sadness and loneliness? How do you usually cope with these feelings? Well maybe the secret is to remind yourself that you're ordinary…  Today we talk with Dr. Ronald Siegel, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, serving on the Board of Directors and faculty of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. He serves on the faculties of the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has written and edited several books; his most recent “The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary” is out now.  Listen in to hear what it means to be ordinary, how we balance conspicuous consumption vs. conspicuous frugality, the greatest informer of how to live, and the key to joy.  Topics We Discuss:  [3:40] Social media presents an unrealistic picture vs. ordinary day-to-day  life. Constant self-monitoring may be genetic. Obsession with selfies and how much we lose the present by wanting to present it perfectly [05:52] We have an instinct for social connection. What social media likes do to the brain and our emotions. How we compare ourselves to others and the constant habit to evaluate our life.  [06:40] Being out with friends is a completely different experience. Safe social connection is where we stop trying to impress, and preoccupations with self fall away so we can open up and be vulnerable.  [7:58] The idea of a “vulnerability hangover” after opening up maybe too much. Metacognitive awareness is the antidote:  the ability to see a thought as just a thought. [9:30] The key to well being is the quality of our relationships. [11:35] Happiness vs. self acceptance or well-being. Allowing feelings to come and go, and allow the emotions to move through us. . The fast changing emotions dn the how much they fluctuate in the day. Once we see how much our emotions can be altered throughout the day, it is all programmable.  [13:10] Just like physical health is about getting sick and getting well again, emotional health is about feeling the range of emotions, including less tolerable emotions, and being able to recover and rebalance.  [14:00] A mindfulness exercise. Allowing thoughts and emotions to flow in and out diffuses intensity.  [19:30] Balancing conspicuous consumption vs. conspicuous frugality. Buying luxury items to show off that we can buy them vs. showing off that we are “enlightened” enough not to care about physical things.  Marketing and consumerism (and even anti-consumerism) and society's obsession with tiers and rankings.  [23:05] Self-esteem vs. self-compassion. How to support your child during and after an upsetting event. We must learn to process these emotions and not try to protect others from them, which prolongs the exposure to the trauma.  [28:18] Death is the greatest informer for how to live better. Awareness of death is a great way to disconnect from the self-esteem roller coaster. All things change. Death is a powerful leveler.  [30:25] Three pronged approach to embracing being ordinary: work with 1) heads, 2) hearts, and 3) habits. 1) Where did I get the idea that being smarter/prettier/richer is better? See the folly in being caught in these patterns. 2) Open to the hurt and disappointment to really feel them and then release them. 3) Evaluate where we put our energies. Are we going to jump on social media or call a friend? FOLLOW DR. RONALD SIEGEL:  Find Dr. Ronald Siegel and the programs he offers on https://drronsiegel.com/  or on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/drronaldsiegel/ Life, Death and the Space Between is brought to you by:  Dr. Amy Robbins | Host, Executive Producer  PJ Duke | Executive Producer  2 Market Media | Video and Audio Editing  Mara Stallins | Outreach & Social Media Strategy  Claire | Clairperk.com | Podcast Cover Design

In February of this year, I had the opportunity to interview, Dr. Chris Germer, a clinical psychologist and part-time lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. As luck (or fate) would have it, I had the chance to interview him on the topic of shame…not once but TWICE. As you'll hear, the first time did not quite go as planned. However, the second time around (which you WILL hear in this episode) we talked about shame, what it is, what it does and what the antidote to it is. Chris' primary interest is his work related to self-compassion. Along with Dr. Kristin Neff (who I talked about in the What to Do When There's Nothing You Can Do episode a few weeks ago), he co-developed the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program and MSC has since been taught to over 200,000 people worldwide. Additionally, they co-authored two books on Mindful Self-Compassion, The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook and Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. In 2007, Chris began collaborating with Kristin Neff, psychology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and pioneering researcher on self-compassion. In 2009, he wrote the book, The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, and, in 2010, Chris and Kristin co-developed Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), an empirically-supported, 8-week training program for the general public. The Center for Mindful Self-Compassion was established in 2012 and since then over 100,000 of people have learned MSC from over 3,000 teachers worldwide. A bestselling workbook on the MSC program appeared in 2018 and a professional textbook was released in 2019, both co-authored by Chris and Kristin. In 2015, Chris helped to establish the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance. He is on the faculty and serves as a senior advisor and research consultant, currently co-developing an fMRI research protocol for treating chronic pain with self-compassion. Chris spends his professional life traveling internationally, teaching and writing about mindfulness and self-compassion, supporting MSC teachers and students, consulting on self-compassion research, and maintaining a modest psychotherapy practice. You can find out more about Dr. Germer's work and the courses he offers on his website https://chrisgermer.com and you can follow him on Instagram @christophergermerphd. You can follow me on Instagram at: @karen.e.osborne Click on this link to join Club Sandwich (the LITSZ Private Facebook Group): LITSZ_Club_Sandwich --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/karen-osborne9/message

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews co-authors Lara and Stephen Sheehi about their book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2021). As they discuss in the interview, the book represents years of research, engagement, and relationship-building with and alongside psychoanalytically oriented Palestinian clinicians working throughout historic Palestine. These relationships and solidarities form the base from which the authors start to think about the intersection of psychoanalysis, decoloniality, and liberatory practice. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis