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What seems like a long time ago, I was teaching in a medical school course that introduced medical students to different philosophies of healing. A person I later got to know and become friends with, a medicine man in the Cherokee tradition named Hawk Littlejohn, gave a lecture on how he understood his approach to compare with conventional allopathic medicine. He talked about understanding illness as a loss of balance between primary forces. I’m not sure how much I remember from his talk and how much I later learned – having been stimulated to read and study Native […]

As I work with adults who experienced childhood trauma, I’ve increasingly become aware of a child’s belief, deep down inside many of these folks, that they are the cause of their own unhappiness.  The chronic symptoms that have brought them to see me reflect how this core belief has lingered into adulthood in crippling ways.

Most children in unhappy settings experience not only physical discomfort but too frequently adults who are inclined to blame and be critical (the lingering residue of their early trauma). Well into adulthood, individuals who grow up in such environments, where the pervasive message is that mistakes […]

I can save you money!!

And no, it is not snake oil.

I’m old and pretty active. I play racquetball several times a week, I garden and haul big, 50 pound bags of “stuff” around and dig and bend over and weed and Kathleen makes sure my vegetable intake is pretty good. I also spend a lot of time sitting in a chair talking to people.

I do have some cardiac risk factors and my family history in that regard is not so good. One of the clinical tools we use in our medical practice is a Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) machine that […]

I was a first-year medical student and like my classmates, vulnerable to developing whatever disease we were studying. Or at least compulsively worrying that I was in the early stages of its development. This week we had learned about anterior compartment syndrome. This is a condition where trauma to the muscle just on the outside of the shin-bone causes bleeding and swelling. That muscle happens to be contained in compartment composed of the tough fibrous sheet – called the fascia – that surrounds the muscle.

Because that sheath is so tough, the swelling has nowhere to go and compresses the muscle. […]