Sublime

When someone you love suffers, you’ve failed to protect them. This may

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.

My mother often commented that when you consider everything that could go wrong with the human body it’s amazing that anything goes right—and for her things mostly had gone right.

Helena Hansen, a psychiatrist and an anthropologist at UCLA who studies racial stereotypes in medicine, told me, “It is woven into the fabric of this country that Black women’s role is to do the work, to do the suffering, so why would we—the mainstream mental-health field—be chasing them down and asking, ‘Can I treat you for your sadness?’”

The bigger problem, though, is that all these hoops made it much more likely that I would just give up or fail to follow through. At times I did. When I later asked Jack Cochran, the former executive director of the Permanente Federation, what happens to patients who don’t have the energy or the means to persevere in connecting their disconnected d

In a different use of the same analogy to a similar end Osler advised: “Live a simple and a temperate life, that you may give all your powers to your profession. Medicine is a jealous mistress.”

ideal patient experience, what are the barriers keeping people from having that kind of experience—the kind where a patient leaves a doctor’s office feeling supported and empowered, and outfitted with treatment options?

including dopamine researcher Dr. Anna Lembke, hormone expert Dr. Aviva Romm, neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart Bieber, and metabolic health specialist Dr. Casey Means (an impressive fan club, if I’ve ever seen one).

had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.