Summary:

Since the first surgeon general was sworn into office in the 19th century, the Office of the Surgeon General has positioned itself as the leading voice on public health matters in the United States. In recent history, the office has had its highest profile campaigns rallying against issues such as tobacco use, obesity, and HIV/AIDS. Considering the combination of prevalence, morbidity, and mortality associated with these health issues, there is no doubt that any effort to stem the tide was a worthwhile endeavor.

When Dr. Vivek Murthy became the surgeon general in 2014, his office continued the historical campaigns against these health issues. At the same time, Dr. Murthy began investigating a looming epidemic within our borders: loneliness and social isolation.

It may be hard to convince the average person that loneliness is a problem of similar scale as tobacco use, obesity, or AIDS. There is no question that loneliness is unpleasant, even if it only lasts for a few moments. But the notion that one’s state of mind can predispose to disease or premature death somehow feels like a stretch. Addressing this skepticism, Dr. Murthy writes in his book about Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University who also faced a great deal of cynicism surrounding her research into the effect of social relationships on “everything from our behavior to our cellular function.” She had a breakthrough in 2010 when she published a massive study analyzing the health outcomes of over 300,000 participants, categorized by their degree of social connectedness. She found that social isolation was significantly linked to premature death, representing a risk nearly as serious as pack-per-day smoking, and more serious than obesity, alcohol use, and lack of exercise. Dr. Holt-Lunstad’s research spurred further studies which linked loneliness to heart disease, stroke, and depression, amongst other diseases.

These findings are hard to ignore, especially in light of the ongoing opioid addiction crisis and rises in teenage depression and suicide, all of which have been linked to loneliness and social isolation. In Together, Dr. Murthy weaves together scientific research, personal anecdotes, and current events to create a manifesto for tackling the next great public health crisis.

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Michael Pollan, a journalist who is known for his work on food, takes on mind-altering drugs, or more specifically, psychedelics. According to Pollan, “after several decades of suppression and neglect, psychedelics are having a renaissance” (p. 3). His aim is to tell “the story of this renaissance” (p. 4). 

Pollan pegs the beginning of the renaissance to three events in 2006. The first was the symposium surrounding the one–hundredth birthday celebration of Albert Hoffman, who is credited with discovering LSD (he was in attendance and lived for another two years). The symposium put a spotlight on a few studies of psychedelics that inspired other researchers and practitioners to enter or stay in the field. The second event was a U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting importation of a banned psychedelic substance for religious purposes, which effectively reanimated federal government recognition of psychedelic drugs. The third event was the publication of a well-received study showing the psychological effects of certain psychedelic drugs, and in so doing, conferred some credibility and encouragement for further study (and use). Psychedelics were beginning to inch their way from counterculture to mainstream culture.

Before Pollan picks up on what happens after the eventful year of 2006, he goes back to the early 1950s when psychedelics first attracted attention as treatment for “addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end-of life anxiety” (p. 141). He quotes researcher Stephen Ross, who asserts that during this time, “there had been forty thousand research participants and more than a thousand clinical papers!…Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding” (pp. 142-143). The trajectory towards therapeutic uses would come to an end in the 1960s when “a moral panic about LSD engulfed America, and virtually all psychedelic research and therapy were either halted or driven underground” (p. 185). Pollan identifies several contributing factors to the precipitous reversal in the status of psychedelics. Among them were their associations with Timothy Leary (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”) and with counterculture movements that were seen as threats to mainstream society in general. The era ends in 1970 when psychedelics were made illegal in the U.S., after which they were largely forgotten. They began to reappear in the 1990s, which rekindled an interest in them that would reach an inflection point in 2006.

Bridging the mid-twentieth-century history Pollan provides and the era commencing in 2006 he describes in detail later, is a chapter reporting on his own experiences with psychedelics. Pollan arranged three separate “trips” with three individual psychedelics: psilocybin, LSD, and the little-known 5-MeO-DMT, or “The Toad.” He carefully chose a tour guide for each one. Pollan experienced what he interpreted as a dissolution of his ego, which made more room for his consciousness: “I was present to reality but as something other than my self” (p. 264). He also reported spiritual and mystical experiences, which surprised him because he is not religious in much of any way, and he found others who had similar experiences.  

Even the most secular among them come away from their journeys convinced there exists something that transcends a material understanding of reality: some sort of a ‘Beyond.’ (p. 85)  

The term “spiritual” for Pollan became “a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced” (p. 288). 

In another chapter bridging the past and the present, Pollan covers the neuroscience of psychedelics and the current understanding of how the brain works. The chapter will appeal mostly to neuroscientists, pharmacologists, and clinicians. It’s not required to appreciate what the book offers on the whole. 

Pollan devotes a chapter to ongoing investigations into clinical uses for psychedelics in near death, addiction, and depression. These investigations had moved into mainstream biomedical research institutions. Results were encouraging enough to generate additional studies, expand treatment programs, and motivate the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to push researchers for more information on depression in particular. Pollan also reports that “dozens of medical schools have asked to participate in future trials, and funders have stepped forward to underwrite those trials” (p. 350).  

In the final chapter, Pollan recognizes that despite the momentum behind mainstream biomedicine interest in psychedelics, established clinical and regulatory frameworks pose daunting challenges for broad-based adoption anytime soon. That aside, Pollan argues for the use of psychedelics in situations that are not limited to health problems per se, but also for “the betterment of well people,” which was also an interest of early researchers. To Pollan, the betterment comes from the effect of psychedelics to expand consciousness. 

Most of the time, it is normal waking consciousness that best serves the interests of survival—and is not adaptive. But there are moments in the life of an individual or a community when the imaginative novelties proposed by altered states of consciousness introduce exactly the sort off variation that can send a life, or a culture, down a new path. (p. 407) 

His conclusion is that without the assistance of psychedelics, the vastness of the mind and the mysteries of the world can never be known. Psychedelics for everyone! 

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This important and much needed book describes the psychological difficulties of doctors in training and in practice and the woeful lack of support to them from teachers, colleagues, and institutions. When there are over 50 percent of doctors suffering burnout (or depression, even suicide), shouldn't we see and ameliorate this "significant public health crisis" (p. 263)?
Carolyn Elton is a vocational psychologist who has spent the last 20 years working with doctors in England and the U.S.  She has worked with over 600 doctors in a wide variety of specialties. 
   
Introduction: “Medicine in the Mirror”
Elton starts with a real-life email from a desperate medical student. She cites examples of med. students who commit suicide, studies of depressed doctors, and surveys that show impacts on medical care for all of us when it is given by doctors suffering from poor morale.

Ch. 1, "Wednesday's Child" discusses young doctors suddenly thrown into clinical practice; many are unready for the stress, and many training programs do not support them sufficiently.

Ch. 2,  "Finding the Middle." Many senior doctors are inhospitable to young doctors, especially those trained in other countries, for example India. There’s hope for sharing and support in  Schwartz Rounds, where staff (clinical and nonclinical) meet and discuss issues.

Ch. 3,  "Which Doctor." We learn that many troubled doctors have chosen the wrong specialty for them, often because of a specific illness in their families. They should have more time to chose or, even, to change specialties.

Ch. 4, "Brief Encounter."  Psychological concepts of transference and counter-transference are helpful in understanding sexual issues (examining patients' sex organs, homosexuality, sexism, inappropriate humor, attraction to a patient, even past sexual abuse). Many of these are common but so taboo that they are ordinarily—and unfortunately—not discussed in training. 

Ch. 5, “Role Reversal.” The book’s title “also human” is front and center here, because doctors become sick, injured, or otherwise compromised so that they must have medical assistance. Regrettably, other doctors often dismiss such problems or even blame the doctor for causing them or not overcoming them. Further, doctors often try to avoid a sick role. Psychological dilemmas and physical disabilities are often stigmatized.

Ch. 6, “Leaky Pipes.” Women doctors are often ill-treated, especially in surgery, where “surgical culture embodies masculinity” (p. 152). Women wishing to have children and family life in general are seen as slackers. Women doctors often “leak out” from hospital work to part-time community-based roles.

Ch. 7, “Risky Business.” Once again, we read that there is bias against Asian, black, disabled, or female doctors.  Specific examples and studies from social science make this dramatically clear. This unfortunate dynamic makes careers in medicine for such doctors “psychologically risky” (p. 192).

Ch. 8, “No Exit.” For many reasons it is hard to quit medical school, later training, or work in medicine, even when this is the best choice. Doctors often feel pain, even guilt when patients die, and they have little support.

Ch. 9, “Natural Selection.” Reviewing many problems already discussed, Elton summarizes: “sometimes the dream of training as a doctor turns out to be a nightmare in reality” (p. 229).  There’s bias in selection of students, reliance on tests with limited accuracy, insensitivity to the whole person, and inappropriate retention of students who should not become doctors. The Darwinian chapter title is ironic; much of the medical world as structured today is not natural.

Epilogue, “There’s No Such Thing as a Doctor.” This arresting subtitle brings us back to the personhood of doctors, who have psychological needs right along with the rest of us. Regrettably, “doctors’ psychological needs are denied, ignored, not thought about. Unmet” (p. 258). Sexism and racism are common. Lister’s reforms took a long time but are now pervasive and standard; can we similarly expand better care for doctors?  “Improving the emotional well-being of the medical workforce requires interventions that tackle three interconnected levels—the individual, the organization, and the culture of medicine as a whole” (p. 265).

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Citing numerous studies that might be surprising to both lay and professional readers, Dr. Rakel makes a compelling case for the efficacy of empathic, compassionate, connective behavior in medical care.  Words, touch, body language, and open-ended questions are some of the ways caregivers communicate compassion, and they have been shown repeatedly to make significant differences in the rate of healing. The first half of the book develops the implications of these claims; the second half offers instruction and insight about how physicians and other caregivers can cultivate practices of compassion that make them better at what they do.  

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The Cardiologist's Daughter offers readers a mélange of memories, retelling through poetry how the poet's mixed heritage (East Indian and Dutch) fused into her unique identity-- as a naturopath daughter of an M.D. father and R.N. mother. The strongest poems in this collection are about her relationship with her father-- as the title suggests. But other poems about her interest in science, growing up in the southern states of the United States, and other relationships-- with teachers, friends, other relatives, nicely fill out this collection.

The opening poem, The Cardiologist's Daughter Returns Home, recounts her father's heart attack, ending with these lines: "The bypass cannot/be bypassed and in returning/life, there will be death and/with it, tissue upon/tissue blooming/the rows as rose/a garden of flesh/raising a bed/of stitches (11)."  Later in the volume, she recalls how, in Once, a father, the crook of his arm,  her father plays with her after work: "After the heart patients clear, he swaps stethoscope/for the necklace of his daughter, stocking legs/looping his throat, as she, on his shoulders/steals second supper: curry potatoes,/basmati rice, cucumber yogurt from his plate (27)."  In How We Sketch the Departed, a poem about the death of her Dutch grandfather who " commanded thousands/of conifers for his Dutch nursery (47)", she recounts first the death of a butterfly: "That night the butterfly scorched /in the woodstove due to inattention, mine/and the butterfly's. Flame sputtered as smoke/formed a pillow for the insect's final sleep-- black/smearing the azure that lined its wings (45)."

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Several threads tie together this ambitious, beautifully digressive reflection on eros and logos in the experience of illness and the conduct of medicine and health care, which takes into account what a complex striation of cultural legacies, social and political pressures, and beliefs go into both.  Framing his reflections on the role of unknowing, altered states, inexplicable events, desire, hope, love, and mystery in illness and healing is a fragmented, poignant narrative of Morris’s own experience of watching his wife succumb to the ravages of early Alzheimer’s. 

Her disease is one that leads both professional and intimate caregivers to the same question:  what do you do when there’s nothing left for scientific medicine to do?  Conversations about palliative care are broadening, he points out, and medical education is making more room for the kind of reflection the arts invite and for spirituality as a dimension of illness experience and caregiving.  Guidance in such explorations can be found in ancient literature, especially in the archetypes provided by the Greek and Roman myths.  Morris makes astute and helpful use of his own considerable training in literary studies to provide examples of how eros and logos—complementary contraries—have been conceived and embodied in a somewhat polarized culture and how incomplete health care is when it doesn’t foster the capacity to dwell in and with unknowing, possibility, indeterminacy, and mystery.  Knowing the limits of scientific medicine may, paradoxically, make it better.  Certainly it can help keep our engagements with illness—always relational, always disruptive, most often to some degree bewildering—humane.

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Andrew Schulman is a New York guitarist with a long history of playing in hotels, restaurants, small groups, and formal concerts—even in Carnegie Hall, the White House, and Royal Albert Hall. His memoir describes his experience as a patient in a Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU), where he was briefly clinically dead. Six months later he began a part-time career as a guitarist playing for patients and staff in that very same SICU. 
           
In July of 2009, Schulman underwent surgery for a pancreatic tumor (luckily benign) but crashed afterward. He suffered cardiac arrest and shortage of blood to his brain for 17 minutes. Doctors induced a week-long medical coma, but his condition worsened. His wife asked if he could hear music; he had brought a prepared iPod. When the opening chorus of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion played in his earbud, the computer monitor showed that his vital signs stabilized, and he survived. The nurses called it a miracle.            

Convinced of music’s healing power, Schulman proposed that he return and play for patients and staff. He describes various patients for whom he played over the next six years (with permission or changes of name and details). He explains his approach to choosing music, pacing it, and feeling hunches for what is right for a given patient. He interviews experts and reads scientific papers in order to explain how the brain processes music. Music reminds patients of their earlier, healthier lives; it coordinates right and left brain; it brings calmness and peace.
 
Imaging studies show that music (and emotionally charged literature) stimulate the brain regions associated with reward—similar to euphoria, sex, and use of addictive drugs.

Schulman knew some 300 pieces from a wide range of music, but his illness damaged his memory so that he could recall only six of them. That meant his work relied on sheet music. Near the end of the book, however, his “rehab” of playing three times a week, concentrating on the music, and intending to help others—all this allowed his brain to heal, and he began to memorize as before. Schulman consults with experts and undergoes two brain scans and other studies that show the neuroplasticity of this brain that allowed it to rewire and memorize once again.

Although Music Therapy is discussed as an allied profession, Schulman is considered, rather, as a “medical musician” playing only in the SICU. Provision of music, whether by Music Therapist or “medical musician,” is, however, usually not covered by insurance and therefore not available to patients.           

There’s a six-page Afterword by Dr. Marvin A. McMillen, who Schulman describes as “central” to his survival. McMillen writes that being both a critical care doctor and a critical care patient himself (polycystic kidney disease), he knows the importance of emotional support to patients, healing environments, and the power of music. McMillen was also pivotal in allowing Schulman to play in the SICU.

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