Health/Wellness

Announcing the Compassionate Inquiry Online Training

I’m excited to announce a new online course that has been years in the making, Compassionate Inquiry. Created with the collaboration of N.D. and international yoga teacher Sat Dharam Kaur. Compassionate Inquiry is an in depth teaching and distillation of the approach I have developed to working with human beings beset by personal issues, health […]

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BEYOND DRUGS: The Universal Experience of Addiction

With the carnage imposed by the current epidemic of opioids and associated overdoses across North America–many dozens of people dying every day– public alarm around addiction is focused almost exclusively on drugs. For all the anguish around substance dependence, addiction cuts a much broader swath across our culture. Most addicted people use no drugs at

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Dr. Gabor Maté’s Critique of the Surgeon General’s Report Facing Addiction in America

I read the Facing Addiction in America, the Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs and Health with a combination of enthusiastic appreciation and dismay. Those impressions were further reinforced recently on hearing the SG, Rear Admiral Vivek Murthy in person, at the Patrick Kennedy Forum on addiction in Chicago. I see the report as a

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How to Build a Better Culture of Good Health

“I never get angry,” says a character in one of Woody Allen’s movies. “I grow a tumor instead.” Much more scientific truth is captured in that droll remark than many doctors would recognize. Mainstream medical practice largely ignores the role of emotions in the physiological functioning of the human organism. Yet the scientific evidence abundantly

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Was Reagan’s Trademark Smile The First Sign of Alzheimer’s?

Until his death, former U.S. president Ronald Reagan was the world’s most famous Alzheimer’s sufferer. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he wrote in his poignant farewell message to Americans when he was first diagnosed at 83. The acknowledgment marked the formal onset of his long,

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A Letter to Canada’s Minister of Disease?

Dear Rona Ambrose, As a member of the federal government, you are currently titled Canada’s Health Minister. I question the accuracy of that nomenclature. You have recently taken it upon yourself to void a decision by Health Canada, the public agency granted the task of supervising health practices in this country.

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A Celebrity Death, Addiction, and the Media

It is always big news when a celebrity is stricken dead by a substance overdose. What never makes the news is why such tragedies surrounding addiction happen. The roster of drug- and alcohol-related show-business deaths is ever expanding: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain; in the recent past, Heath Ledger, Michael

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The Naomi Project – It’s No Fix, But It’s The Best We Can Do For Addicts

The official U.S. response to the free heroin trial about to begin in Vancouver is predictably negative. A spokesman for John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, calls it “an inhumane medical experiment.” “I would bet any amount of money the U.S. has exerted extreme pressure on Canada to

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