Trying not to think about something will cause you to think about it more. All of us know this phenomenon but we don’t know how to deal with it. The deadliest emotion we suppress is anxiety. It is a survival response and our whole being is repulsed by it. … Read More
Tinnitus is an annoying (miserable) symptom that I had experienced since 1985. In another website post, The Ringing in My Ears, I tell my story about how it has all but disappeared. I was being interviewed on a radio program and somehow the topic of tinnitus came up. The host … Read More
In our society today, it’s commonly believed that the higher the opinion you have of yourself, the more confident, happy, and successful you’ll be; high self-esteem is held up as the ultimate goal. In actuality, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth: the pursuit of self-esteem is a destructive … Read More
Structuring the Own Management of Your Pain (STOMP) is a program that was developed by Dr. Gordon Irving and his staff at the Swedish Medical Center Pain and Headache Center. They have a wonderful set of resources that has greatly enhanced my patient’s capacity to become pain free. They also … Read More
A friend of mine asked me for an opinion a couple of years ago about his back. I was giving him advice as a friend, not as a surgeon. He was having some pain and numbness down the side of his leg. It was down the distribution of his 5th … Read More
Meditation is a powerful tool in calming down your nervous system, and is a skill that everyone should be taught in elementary school and continue to hone throughout a lifetime. Think what we are not taught about stress, anxiety, and frustration at an early age. A child has little control … Read More
Dr. Gordon Irving was in charge of Swedish Medical Center Chronic Pain Program for many years. His group has embraced the treatment principles of the Neurophysiologic Disorder (NPD. Although each of us have different tools and styles, the essence of our approaches is similar. One of them being you cannot … Read More
ANGER ANGEL Love and rage are both four-letter words. A N G E R A G E A N G E L O V E The difference between the words anger and angel is one letter. What a difference a letter makes.
The Swerve, by Steven Greenblatt is a historical account of a papal scribe’s discovery in the 1400’s of a poem, The Nature of Things. Lucretius had written it almost 1000 years earlier. He makes a case that it was the discovery of this poem that ushered the human race out of … Read More
I had a lot going on during my junior year in high school. I had left home to attend a boarding school and was free from a chaotic household. It was also incredibly stressful trying to figure out what was going on and how I fit in. In the midst … Read More