The 3 Keys to Avoiding Opioid Dependency
When I think about chronic pain, I think about my patient Margaret and her back pain. She wasn’t sure how it started – maybe she lifted her grandson wrong, or…
Four Crucial Actions to Manage Your Chronic Pain
It takes a village to manage chronic pain – or at least a multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals with you (and your own self-care) at its center. With a pain…
Your Complete Guide to Building the Right Pain Management Team
If you’re like most people, the doctor you see most often is your primary care provider, likely a family physician or internist. And that’s certainly the place to start when…
A Look Into My Wife’s Response to Cancer
My wife, Susan, has experienced five types of cancer in her life—breast, melanoma, basal cell, and squamous cell and we have always been very different in our responses to it.…
How Our Government Can Improve Our Healthcare System
It’s clear that the US healthcare system needs changing. The costs are too high and the results too poor. The system also needs changing because our patients have changed. What…
The Four Dimensions of Healing Everyone Should Know About
Only about 15 to 20 percent of health-related outcomes are attributable to medical interventions. The rest are related to health behaviors such as diet, physical activity, and smoking status, with…
The One Aspect of Healing Our Healthcare System Gets Wrong
When I began practice as a young doctor, I thought that the treatments I gave to patients were the primary reason they got well. But after almost 40 years of…
Healing Tool Series: HeartMath® emWave® Training System
A stress management training system that monitors stress by measuring a person’s heart rate variability and provides biofeedback to increase this heart rate variability, which correlates with the relaxation response…
Healing Tool Series: Narrative Medicine
A patient-centered, collaborative storytelling process to deliver respectful, empathic, and effective medical care for serious illness “Healing Tools” summaries are a collection of evidence-based resources to help providers and patients…
A Patient’s View: Athlete Scores Against Chronic Pain
Exercise, meditation and mindfulness, yoga and an anti-inflammatory diet lead to a nearly pain-free life Like many teenagers, John Slay wanted to be a professional athlete. As a baseball, basketball…