It's been a long time coming... AND, I'm happy to say I've played a part...
When I started medical school I was one of the only holistic-leaning students in my class. Now almost every medical school has an Integrative Medicine department or curriculum of some kind. It's awesome!
As part of my personal commitment to help medicine become more holistic...not just for my patients, but on a grander scale, I try to teach at medical schools whenever I can. Since moving to San Diego in 2017, I've been intermittently teaching for UCSD in both the family medicine and psychiatry departments. I just taught in the psychiatry department last Thursday! It was so much fun! Quite a few residents and med students came up afterwards or reached out by email saying the lecture really inspired them...helped them think outside-the-box about how to practice or what their career could be! ✨ Awesome!! ✨ I may end up working with a few of them in the Integrative Med Mentorship Program I have in my private practice, too! The talk was geared towards practicing physicians, so was not quite as overtly rainbow-infused as this pic (my slide template WAS purple polka dots tho!! 💜). I will say there were rainbows on the inside ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 as I talked about all kinds of evidence-based herbal/supplement recommendations for anxiety, depression, stress, and insomnia. Also talked about probiotics and the microbiome, yoga, meditation, nutrition, creativity, and nature!⚡️🌿⚡️🧘♀️⚡️🥑⚡️🥦⚡️🎨 . I am grateful for the opportunity to help medicine evolve! I am also grateful I've had the courage 🦁 to do things differently—in medicine and in life!! It has taken drive, determination, bravery, and grit to pursue the path less traveled, but I feel it was what I was born to do. My astrology chart gave me a strong Mars on the ascendant (courage, determination, independence), a 5th house sun (love of the spotlight, performer traits), strong teacherly qualities (Jupiter-teacher/spiritual guide in the 10th house of career directly opposite Mercury in creative, balanced Libra). Being a doctor AND an astrologer is definitely unusual and really not accepted in the western medical paradigm. Interestingly, it was the way medicine was practiced in antiquity, however.
Hippocrates was a physician astrologer. Nostradamus. Paracelsus. Carl Jung. Many of my own physician roles models, way showers saw the value in practicing this way. I never set out to be an astrologer-physician. It just happened that I am quite naturally talented at pattern-recognition--a skill that is highly useful in both medicine and astrology. I started studying astrology for fun in the year 2000. Every year I found it more and more fascinating, rather than less. 19 years later I've learned a lot. And so, I am a professional astrologer as well as a physician. Turns out it's been so valuable I cannot imagine practicing without it.
I didn't teach about astrology at UCSD, however. The future of medicine is holistic, but change happens one step at a time. I'm a way shower, so I have tended to know many things beyond what the average, even the average holistic, doctor knows. I hope there is a time when I can lecture about the thoughtful integration of astrology BACK into medicine. For now, I am content to release many other little bits of meaningful and important info that I think a room full of doctors is ready to receive. Doctors like evidence, and luckily there is now a lot of evidence validating many holistic approaches. Astrology, unfortunately, is not among them. It certainly is validated in my own life, however, and in the lives of so many of my clients. But, it is hard to study something so specific by current research methods. So we wait, celebrating other little victories along the way... . . #thisishowchangehappens 🌟 #newparadigm #itsajourney #holisticmedicine#integrativepsychiatry#ucsdschoolofmedicine #lightingthepath👣
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