Brave New Medicine by Cynthia Li, MD

[PerditaPickle]

I'm listening to this book Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness on Audible, having stumbled across an interview with the author on a podcast, The Doctor’s Farmacy, on YouTube (I'll see if I can find a link).  I'm about two thirds of the way through it, I suspect, but I can't recommend this book highly enough, so far.

It's relatable, reassuring (in an 'I'm not the only one' way), relevant to us Pagan types, and also provides actual, practical steps one can follow if one so chooses.

Here's the YouTube video, if you want the short version:
(For inclusivity, the video is a fairly lengthy (1 hour 15 min) interview by Mark Hyman with Cynthia Li, who talks about her health issues and how she came to look to this unconventional path to treat her autoimmune disease.)

[Kasmira]

Here's the YouTube video, if you want the short version:

Thank you for sharing this. As both a physician and a priest, functional/integrative medicine is a big part of my practice. I had not heard of Dr Li but it turns out she lives really near to me so I'm hoping to be able to work with her or at least send patients her way.

I wonder what folks here think about the distinction they both make in the video between whether or not something is "just in my head". From a Buddhist perspective, at least, the distinction between something being "in the head" vs "in the body" is itself all in our heads  . Allopathic (western) medicine has historically focused on this distinction and I wonder if it can be hard for us to let it go, even when we're trying to come from a more integrative perspective. In that light, it would make sense that they talk about symptoms being "in the head" as a negative/pejorative thing.

I chose to train as a priest precisely because, for so many of my patients, their health were shaped more by their emotional and spiritual perspectives than the "in the body" pathology of their disease. That was equally true for patients with obvious "physical" disease as for those with a less easy to point to diagnosis. Still, the structure of the medical system severely limits not only my ability to act on this perspective, but also even to think in a more integrative way as I'm constantly pushed to describe and treat everything in a very deconstructed way (broken up not only into mind and body, but also into specific organ systems, etc).

I wonder if this same pressure is felt within the rest of western culture, outside of the medical profession? What experiences have folks here had in seeking a broader type of healing? Or in practicing more integrative healing modalities?

[PerditaPickle]

So I'm not sure how I managed to miss this post back in September, but I will be trying to compose a reply when I get a chance as I do have a couple of points (if I can articulate them sensibly).  I'm not sure whether Kasmira will be back soon, though, so I won't make it the highest priority thing on my To Do list.