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doctor.heal.thyself

Traveling the 🌏 for my next 📚, exploring different ways to see the body, why it hurts, how it heals. Allopathy. Ayurveda. TCM. Plant medicine.

there’s no place like home.

there’s no place like home.

loved this convo (link in bio) about how ER’s mi

loved this convo (link in bio) about how ER’s might change to better reflect the deeper humanity at work within them, how to metabolize emotional pain on the fly, and what i would choose as a last meal.

chip buffet.

after, i’d feel so sick, i’d be like: just kill me.

in their current forms, emergency departments (and other expresssions of medicine) fall short of meeting the needs of people who seek care within them in exactly the same way they do those working within them. in my view, you can’t meet the needs of the former without considering the latter. a system that is neither safe, beautiful, nor kind to work within can conjure none of those things. it must be sweet, all the way through, and when we are thrown off balance by the many traumatic visions we have of people on their worst day, catch us, hold us, care for us, remind us at every vantage of what we hope to deliver.

the next turning of medicine is one in which we recognize and focus on the humanity of people within the system. if such change doesn’t occur, and we are forced to measure success only on number of patients seen or vaccination rates or wait times, the deeper spiritual and social aspects of medicine will be shut further down and our ability to guide people (and society) towards a healthier future will fade even faster than it already is.

medicine is given freely from nature, is for all people, no matter who or where they are, no matter what they believe. it must come from a healthy planet, and be delivered to those who need it with kindness for it to have its most profound effect. as those of us within it are part of that kindness, we remember who we are, nothing but small parts of a much bigger thing, in whose arms we have nothing to fear and know only love.

#emergencymedicine #wellness #wellbeing #pratītyasamutpāda

winter: that’s a wrap. i came to the skibum life

winter: that’s a wrap. i came to the skibum life late, but i’m dutiful. it was a sweet, deep gift to be so close to nature and the granite gravity of such high peaks. i was invited to play every day, something that can seem a luxury in the city, reserved for weekends. “now” nature calls, “only ever now, so get it before it’s too late”.

i am back to the city, though, and its grinding life, spilling energy to all sides, into the night sky, over sparking street car wires. humans, we have our own beauty too, but it needs some leaning into. as is true of snowboarding, perhaps all gravity or flow sports, there are guidances that map beyond mountains:
1) you’ll be tempted to lean back from fear of falling, but if you lean forward, you’ll gain control
2) don’t look at what you don’t want to hit but where you need to go
3) don’t go on the most direct route, top to bottom, instead play around side to side, for the mountain is but a wave lost to time, and you should touch as much of it as you can
4) s/he who was the most fun wins.

see you city side for the summer love of frisbee and biking and dancing and a million minds moving. x

#skibum #snowboarding #fernie #lifelessons #authorsofinstagram

the powder of positive thinking. #firsttracks #sn

the powder of positive thinking. #firsttracks

#snowboarding
#powder

how i get high.

how i get high.

what did i learn? get close to god and stay there.

what did i learn? get close to god and stay there.

i meant to ask them to leave the ”cancer” part of the story out, but forgot. wearing the mantle of patient is hard even now. the strangest emotion for me was the shame of getting it. if i felt shame, was i harbouring a slight resentment towards my patients, that they somehow brought their illness on? if so, what else was there, deep in my heart, my profession, preventing me from connecting with the human in front of and inside me? a fear of my own dying, an invisible wall built of experiences and material things to keep at bay the truth that life is a one way journey only, incredibly precious, never to be repeated in the same incarnation as the one that catches us like a dandelion seed in our mother’s womb and bears us into the beautiful, vicious air of life.

if we were only taught this in medical school, or at all, we would pray more, give thanks more. if not to god, then to chance for this one breath, moving in and out like the tide all of our days, and know our position not as healers, but as witness to a miracle. we would see fewer patients, not stop when they were well, for there is joy to know too. there would be art in our offices and hospitals, for we would understand ourselves as creator, like our eternal mother, not consumer, no matter what culture tells us. we would let ourselves be fully caught by the healing thing that knits bodies together when it can, makes health systems when it can’t, because it is beautiful, good and true, and there is nothing to be ashamed of.

what will that look like? getting the right people in the ER who can, amidst its chaos, claim reverent space, affirm parts of the job we love (face-time with patients), soften ones that hurt (hierarchy, negative talk). we will train in non-violent communication, seed compassion as central to how we treat each other and our students, as it must carry from there. we will create quiet, beautiful spaces, not for our patients but ourselves, and they will not be the first to go when people fill our hallways, but the last. ER’s will be as as the lives they hold.

link in bio.

#emergencymedicine #burnout #wellness #wellbeing #medicine

since i was a child, i’ve found meaning through

since i was a child, i’ve found meaning through music. i’m not clear where the obsession came from. my folks put on records here and there, but their lives didn’t end up revolving around it (ha) like mine did. as soon as i had a job, my money went to records and shows. i came to toronto to study medicine, but music is why i stayed. its also how i found the friends who are my family, shows, dancefloors, record stores, subway parties, block jams around the world.

in 1999 a neurology resident, asked me to “watch” his technics-1200 record players. you can’t WATCH record players. i started visiting play de record in toronto, found ever greater music nerds, and graduated into the role of DJ, not from mixing skill, but from record buying fervor. before cdj’s, to be a dj, you just needed to be a person willing to spend $20 on a single. i was that person.

dj’ng is different now. controllers, beat match with a click, no record stores. one thing remains the forever same: when you are enveloped by a song, something deep within you starts singing too.

if i could choose an event that influenced my dj stylings most, it was at PS1’s first warmup in queen’s new york, the year 2000. after hours of house or disco or whatever, miho hatori, of the japanese band cibo mato, dj’d. she threw down a stevie wonder record, then a guns and roses one, then cypress hill. i was, like: that’s the type of dj i will be because i love it all.*

i’ve made ranging mixtapes for new years since then of songs new to me, for friends or lovers, party people, but mostly i made them for me. it means devotion to a handful of songs, listening again and again, rearranging them. it means i get to fall in love with music, like i did that first time i heard it carrying through my mothers loving skin into the soft nest of me, helping me know that though there was more to this world than i could ever get to, there would always be a place for me.

and for you. hope you like these tunes if you do, share it with those who might too. love. j

*all music except baroque classical and new-country.

IMAGE electron microscopy of sound receptors (green) from a mouse’s inner-ear

#music #mixtape #bestof2022

far away so close.

far away so close.

i’ll practice medicine until the end. i’ve mad

i’ll practice medicine until the end. i’ve made a bit of a shift in how, when i became the executive editor of the CMAJ, one of the best medical journals in the world (hard to say as a canadian, but true). the people who gather around it understand medicine is a flower unfurling, helping more and more people in ever deeper ways, no matter who or where they are.

i Loved my clinical job. see? a capital. that much. i still do some because i’m not ready give up the feeling that occurs when we close the curtain and say “i’m doctor soandso, how can i help you?” it is so eternal you get the sense something grand is living through you, something mothering in the most loving sense, that would wipe the fears away from all her children.

if i have lived past lives, i’ve no memory of them. i do feel i’ve lived future ones, however, and in them, no one gets sick from a lack of kindness. wars are through. we recognize our inheritance from this earth, as one of abundance not scarcity, that we have been giving everything we needs, every medicine, the answer to every question that matters.

tough to believe with so much evidence to the contrary, but i know what i know. it may not come fast enough for us to see it all, but it’s ok. what is leading us there doesn’t think in human lifetimes. i wrote this editorial because i believe the way is lit, in part, on the pages of medical journals.

if i have one regret about the copy, it is that when I imagined the next twenty years, in addition to a “hospital care that reaches into our home” etc, i would have added “an indigenous health system that includes everyone”, founded in ceremony and in harmony with the planet. oh, and more art everywhere. medical school from grade one. and and and.

i evoke a wisdom passed to me from Katherine Whitecloud, last time i was at The Turtle Lodge, about knowing our acts as sewing seams into a future we will wear. that is how i feel about the clinical act, each move we make actually, prayers for others made standing in the river of time.

glad to be together with all of you, in the middle of it, doing our best.

link in bio.

#medicine #thefuture

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