I believe that medicine’s potential is much more than the version we see in the world today. A doctor should be an educator with the goal of bringing patients to a place of deeper understanding of who they are in the world. To me, medicine is ultimately about self-empowerment through self-knowledge and growth.
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It was hot yesterday… and it might have gone to my head.
Hotter than yesterday.
A major new review of the research published this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry reached a interesting conclusion. In “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” a team of six top European researchers found “there is no evidence of a connection between reduced serotonin levels or activity and depression.”
The truth is we don’t know why antidepressants work. Actually, we are unsure of lots of things in our mental (and physical) health. It’s a fact that most of the major studies in psychology can’t be reproduced. In 2015 a huge, collaborative research project attempted to recreate 100 studies that were recently published in major psychology journals, and it found that only 39 of those studies’ results could be replicated.
We are more than just physical bodies. We have to take our soul-spiritual life into account.
An analysis of self-connection is a great place to start to see what this means. We need to look at the three components of self-connection (as detailed in an article by Arash Emamzadeh in Psychology Today from May of this year). “These consist of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-alignment.
We can’t be at home without self-connection. There are many opportunities to practice this throughout the day:
Just be aware without judging your experience. Your self-connection attempts will slowly shift… everything. It will give you more stamina, more options, more levity. Our self wants to be seen and heard and experienced. If it’s uncomfortable to go there because of guilt or sadness, take little pit stops, at first. You’ll learn to not get lost in racing around.
A banker said to an economist:
“The cyclist is a disaster for the country’s economy, we need more drivers, not bikers. The cyclist doesn’t buy cars with cash and she doesn’t borrow money to buy them. She doesn’t even need to purchase a car insurance policy.
She doesn’t buy fuel, she doesn’t have to pay to get the car serviced, and she has no need for repairs to her vehicle. She doesn’t use paid parking in the city. She causes no major accidents. And she creates no need for multi-lane highways.
Also, she is getting healthier, she is not getting overweight, she sleeps better, and her cardiovascular health improves dramatically.
This is bad because healthy people are less useful to the economy… they do not buy as much fast food, or as much medicine, or go to hospital as frequent. Simply put, healthy people on bikes add less to the country’s GDP… Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don’t even buy a bicycle! Walkers are a complete & utter travesty.”
Don’t let someone else’s version of you limit you or drag you down. Go against the main cultural current to be healthy, listening to your intuition, fully inhabiting your physical body. We will build a new economy based on your good health and your self-connection and the social interaction that come from it.
