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Sri Aurobindo, the Psychic Being, and Integrative Medicine Nov 27, 2022

Show notes

In this episode we meet Dr. Sangeeta Sahi, who during her medical training found that “scientifically unexplainable healing instances” lead her to formulate a framework called Integrative Medicine. Sangeeta shares how she arrived at the intersection of modern medicine and Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga to formulate alternative and holistic healing modalities. We start our discussion with a reading from Sri Aurobindo about idea of the evolutionary soul, called the psychic being, and discuss its central role in personality development, and its integral importance in the cultivation of holistic health. We discuss how one can experience Divine attributes and cosmic archetypes through cultivating yogic equanimity, and the possibilities of cultivating an intuitive knowing, as knowledge by identity, through bringing the psychic being forward in the heart center. We discuss holistic health in relation to the Buddha’s 4 noble truths, as well as how to integrally approaches other problems of our times, such as technology and the climate change crisis. The podcast concludes with Sangeeta speaking about the foundations and goals of her most recent project, the Unified Human Foundation.

Dr. Sangeeta Sahi is an Integrative Medical Doctor and Anti-aging Consultant, who graduated from the Christian Medical College in India, and Whipps Cross Hospital, London, UK. In addition, she received a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from ESSEC in Paris, France. Dr. Sahi is a pioneering medical physician who combines her formal medical training with a host of dynamic complementary and alternative therapies in her practice of Integrative Medicine. She has created a specific program for individuals experiencing Cancer and autoimmune diseases using her particular integrated approach. This program is called Conscious Cancer®. Integrative Medicine reaffirms the importance of the relationship between the practitioner and patient, and emphasizes wellness and healing of the whole person. The physical, mental, social, spiritual, environmental, and other states of being are considered as primary goals. Conventional and Complementary Alternative Medical approaches are used to deliver the most comprehensive patient care. Dr. Sahi uses conventional and complementary alternative medical approaches to deliver the most appropriate and integral patient care. Individuals are made responsible and involved in their own health.

The EWP Podcast credits

East-West Psychology Podcast Website
Connect with EWP: Website • Youtube • Facebook
Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP adjunct faculty, program manager) and Jonathan Kay (PhD student, EWP assistant)
Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay
Edited and Mixed by: Jonathan Kay
Introduction music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala
Music at the end of the episode: Ocean of Light by Jonathan Kay and Hania Luthufi, from the album Eternal Tides: A Musical Offering to the Oceans
Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra

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Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022) Nov 24, 2022

Show notes

Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. By taking a hard look at the racial ideas of both northern and southern medical schools, Christopher D. E. Willoughby reveals that racist ideas were not external to the medical profession but fundamental to medical knowledge.

In this history of racial thinking and slavery in American medical schools, the founders and early faculty of these schools emerge as singularly influential proponents of white supremacist racial science. They pushed an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people’s corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools(UNC Press, 2022) charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Michael Stein, "Accidental Kindness: A Doctor’s Notes on Empathy" (UNC Press, 2022) Nov 22, 2022

Show notes

We will all be patients sooner or later. And when we go to the doctor, when we're hurting, we tend to think in terms of cause and condemnation. We often look for relief not only from physical symptoms but also from our self-blame. We want from our doctors kindness under any of its many names: empathy, caring, compassion, humanity. We look for safety and forgiveness. But we forget that doctors, too, are often in need of forgiveness―from their patients and from themselves. No doctor enters the medical profession expecting to be unkind or to make mistakes, but because of the complexity of our current medical system and because doctors are human, they often find themselves acting much less kindly than they would like to.

Drawing on his work as a primary care physician and a behavioral scientist, Michael Stein artfully examines the often-conflicting goals of patients and their doctors. In those differences, Stein recognizes that kindness should not be a patient's forbidden or unrealistic expectation. Accidental Kindness: A Doctor’s Notes on Empathy (UNC Press, 2022) leaves us with new knowledge of, and insights into, what we might hope for and what might go wrong, or right, in the most intimate clinical moments.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK in 2021.

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Elissa Bassist, "Hysterical: A Memoir" (Hachette, 2022) Nov 22, 2022

Show notes

Today I talked to Elissa Bassist about her memoir Hysterical: A Memoir (Hachette, 2022)

For two years author Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical specialists for pain that none of them managed to diagnose or resolve. Some of their treatments led to other medical problems but never relief. Then an acupuncturist suggested that she simply needed to take control of her voice, and Bassist was shocked when it worked. How, as far as we think we’ve come, is it still the case that a girl born in 1984 could have so much in common with generations of women who were expected to be silent, to "get along," to accept whatever was happening even when their souls ached, their heads pounded, and their bodies withered? Bassist was accused of "being dramatic" when she experienced pain and "inappropriate" when she expressed her sadness or suffering. She said “yes,” when she meant, “no,” and accepted others’ opinions that she was too emotional, too loud, or too aggressive. In her justifiably angry voice, the one she had to take control of, Bassist shares her personal journey from broken and bleeding, scared and lonely, to acerbically funny and quick to call out nonsense. She’s straightforward and unashamed in sharing the moments she’s least proud of and the times she’d rather forget, because now she wants to teach other women that it’s okay to "look bad" in service of unmuting their own voices.

Elissa Bassist is the editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus and the author of the award-deserving memoir Hysterical. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, she’s written cultural and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. She also teaches humor writing at The New School, Catapult, 92NY, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and elsewhere, and she is probably her therapist’s favorite. Bassist lives in Brooklyn with her dog Benny, a very good boy, and when not writing or reading or teaching, she watches horror movies, rides roller coasters, and does light witchcraft.

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com).

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97 Buddhist Medicine and Buddhish Nov 18, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, Pierce Salguero comes on to discuss two of his books: Buddhish, A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical(Beacon Press, 2022) and A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine(Columbia UP, 2022).

Pierce is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities, fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, near Philadelphia.

The major theme in his scholarship is discovering the role of Buddhism in the global transmission and local reception of knowledge about health, disease, and the body.

After graduating in 1996, he lived in Asia for four years — more than two years in Thailand, with extended stays in India, China, and Indonesia as well. During this time, he trained as a practitioner of Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM). Pierce participated in extended stays at Buddhist meditation centers and monasteries in Northeast Thailand and India, including a summer as ananāgārika (white-robed monastic resident) in a Thai Forest-tradition monastery.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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Anita Guerrini, "Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) Nov 16, 2022

Show notes

Experimentation on animals—particularly humans—is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. But the ideas and attitudes that encourage biological and medical scientists to experiment on living creatures date from the earliest expressions of Western thought. In Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) (Johns Hopkins UP), Anita Guerrini looks at the history of these practices and examines the philosophical and ethical arguments that justified them.

Guerrini discusses key historical episodes in the use of living beings in science and medicine, including the discovery of blood circulation, the development of smallpox and polio vaccines, and recent research in genetics, ecology, and animal behavior. She also explores the rise of the antivivisection movement in Victorian England, the modern animal rights movement, and current debates over gene therapy and genetically engineered animals. We learn how perceptions and understandings of human and animal pain have changed; how ideas of class, race, and gender have defined the human research subject; and that the ethical values of science seldom stray far from the society in which scientists live and work.

Thoroughly rewritten and updated, with new material in every chapter, the book emphasizes a broader understanding of experimentation and adds material on gene therapy, self-experimentation, and prisoners and slaves as experimental subjects. A new chapter brings the story up to the present while reflecting on the current regulatory scene, new developments in science, and emerging genomics. Experimenting with Humans and Animals offers readers a context within which to understand more fully the responsibility we all bear for the suffering inflicted on other living beings in the name of scientific knowledge.

Anita Guerrini is a historian of science and medicine, recently retired as Horning Professor in the Humanities at Oregon State University, where she's been since 2008. Before that she was a professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was educated at Connecticut College and Oxford University and received a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University.

Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Steven N. Austad, "Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 15, 2022

Show notes

Opossums in the wild don't make it to the age of three; our pet cats can live for a decade and a half; cicadas live for seventeen years (spending most of them underground). Whales, however, can live for two centuries and tubeworms for several millennia. Meanwhile, human life expectancy tops out around the mid-eighties, with some outliers living past 100 or even 110. Is there anything humans can learn from the exceptional longevity of some animals in the wild? In Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives(MIT Press, 2022), Steven Austad tells the stories of some extraordinary animals, considering why, for example, animal species that fly live longer than earthbound species and why animals found in the ocean live longest of all.

Austad--the leading authority on longevity in animals--argues that the best way we will learn from these long-lived animals is by studying them in the wild. Accordingly, he proceeds habitat by habitat, examining animals that spend most of their lives in the air, comparing insects, birds, and bats; animals that live on, and under, the ground--from mole rats to elephants; and animals that live in the sea, including quahogs, carp, and dolphins.

Humans have dramatically increased their lifespan with only a limited increase in healthspan; we're more and more prone to diseases as we grow older. By contrast, these species have successfully avoided both environmental hazards and the depredations of aging. Can we be more like them?

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Todd Meyers, "All That Was Not Her" (Duke UP, 2022) Nov 09, 2022

Show notes

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her (Duke UP, 2022) Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Harris Solomon, "Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma" (Duke UP, 2022) Nov 04, 2022

Show notes

In Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma(Duke UP, 2022), Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma’s moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied movement that determine survival. In reflecting on the centrality of traffic to life, Lifelines explores a fundamental question: How does medicine move us?

This book is available open access. Please follow this link to access this book free completely of cost.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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Mikkael A. Sekeres, "Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 04, 2022

Show notes

How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin.

Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug's safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust(MIT Press, 2022), Mikkael Sekeres--a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA's cancer drug advisory committee--tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world. It took a series of tragedies and health crises, as well as patient advocacy, for the government to take responsibility for ensuring the efficacy and safety of drugs and medical devices. Before the FDA existed, drug makers could hawk any potion, claim treatment of any ailment, and make any promise on a label. But then, throughout the twentieth century, the government was forced to take action when children were poisoned by contaminated diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, an early antibiotic contained antifreeze, a drug prescribed for morning sickness in pregnancy caused babies to be born disfigured, and access to AIDS drugs was limited to a few clinical trials while thousands died. Sekeres describes all these events against the backdrop of the contentious 2011 hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin, in which he participated as a panel member. The Avastin hearings, he says, put to the test a century of the FDA's evolution, demonstrating how its system of checks and balances works--or doesn't work.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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