Spring day at Zion National Park, Utah
My newsletters' purpose parallels those stated on my website in "My Journey":
"Through my writing, teaching, and digital content, I intend to educate others about the profound possibilities for transformation and healing when a practitioner synthesizes orthomolecular/functional medicine/psychiatry and energy medicine.
My life is dedicated to creative freedom through healing the mind and empowering self-expression. Through service, education, healing, and simply being, my goal is to strengthen people with the tools they need to live life joyfully, authentically, and fully."
Today I want to share the benefits that come from continually adding tools to my toolbox, being innovative and creative, and improving my "standard of care."
Improving the Standard of Care
The benefits of having more tools in your toolbox
Let's be clear, I believe there is much more psychiatrists can do to further mental health than just "the standard of care."
What is the current standard of care? Prescribing psychotropic medications. If one medication doesn't work then switch to another, add more, or increase the dosage. Have a nutritional problem? Medication is the solution for that as well. The current "standard of care" keeps psychiatry myopically focused on medications--indifferent and dismissive of what lies beyond this one paradigm.
Is the pharmaceutical industry a tool of psychiatry or is psychiatry a tool of the pharmaceutical industry?
It is financially advantageous for the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession to have obedient prescribers who believe that medications are the most effective intervention and chronically ill patients dependent on their prescriptions. Clinicians who don't agree with these assumptions are labeled as "practicing outside the standard of care," the equivalent of banishment in medieval days.
The field of psychiatry needs to improve for the patients' sake. It needs to start practicing above and beyond the standard of care. The chronicity of mental illness is the consequence of chronically ineffective medical treatment. If conventional psychiatry refuses to be receptive to alternative approaches, it will lose patients' trust and be replaced by a treatment system that can deliver better results.
I know conventional psychiatrists think holistic and integrative approaches are "quackery" or "a placebo." Certainly, holistic approaches don't have all the solutions to every psychiatric problem either, but they do have many solutions to many psychiatric problems. After 17 years, my practice has absolutely benefitted from adding more holistic tools to my toolbox and I look forward to learning more in the years to come.
For example, remember the newsletter called "Thirty-eight Beads" where I talked about withdrawing a man from Cymbalta? Let me summarize what happened after he stopped those 38 beads. Initially, he felt depressed, anxious, and tired, so I tried adding Celexa. Unfortunately, the added SSRI simply increased the patient's abdominal symptoms, anxiety, and depression, so I discontinued it. We continued to support his recovery with supplements and a diet that lessened food sensitivities because he had a history of IBS. He gradually improved in all areas, and now he is doing much better with mood, energy, and G. I. function. I have another follow-up appointment with him in three weeks.
Then, remember the patient whom I wrote about in "Pearls from the Practice" and "Learning From Our Mistakes"? Yes, the two newsletters were about the same young patient. She needed 5-HTP and Liposomal Catalyst to recover from severe panic attacks, fatigue, and hair loss. She recovered, got off all her medications, including a lot of marijuana, and has remained well. She is enjoying a successful year at her old college--the one that she had to withdraw from when she was ill on two SSRI's. She is thriving and medication-free.
If these kinds of outcomes are just quackery or placebo, then there's something to be said about treatment approaches that result in such quackery and placebo effects. As I used to joke with my patients, "I don't care if I have to paint myself purple with green polka dots; I just want my patients to get better." Adding tools from functional and energy medicine really has helped my patients to get better. It hasn't been an easy journey integrating new tools into my toolbox, but at least I didn't have to dip myself in a vat of purple paint.