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The Making of a Cardiologist/Psychotherapist/Longevity
Doctor
After many years of practicing
traditional cardiology, I spent an additional ten years becoming
certified as a Gestalt and Bioenergetic psychotherapist. Why? Well,
after pronouncing so many people my own age dead in the hospital
(I was 38 at the time), I felt like I was looking in the mirror.
Whoa! I took a really hard look at myself. How was I like them?
How did heart disease come to claim them so early in life? Was heart
disease in my own future?
The more I learned about behavior
and the heart, the more I realized that I myself had all the personality
traits for heart disease. I was driven to achieve, I overworked,
and I was disconnected in many ways from my own feelings. I had
trouble accepting love from others, even when it was offered genuinely.
No matter how much I attended to the needs of others, it never seemed
to fill the hole...I was scared, so I began to work hard on my own
therapy and emotional healing.
My interest then turned to the
emerging field of mind-body medicine. How could I take what I was
leaning about myself and offer it to the patients who were so much
like me? I decided to offer day long workshops on stress and illness
in the early 1980s. I started the New England Heart Center as a
corporation to sponsor research and programs. Participants and staff
explored together the dynamic between the heart that's the beating
center of your physical existence and the heart that is the core
("cor" in Latin literally means heart) of your emotional life.
Later, I facilitated 4, 5 and
6 day workshops with co-psychotherapists, exercise physiologists,
psychologists and nurses who would become personal friends. Our
retreats were conducted in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts,
and Vermont locations. We published some findings from our experiences.
Participants could access massage therapists, Yoga classes, Traeger
massage, Tai Chi, bioenergetic classes, group therapy and more.
All of us followed a special
low fat diet during the longer retreats. And we checked cardiovascular
parameters before and after emotional release workshops; we measured
urines for stress hormones and serum for cholesterol levels, triglycerides
and blood sugars. We tracked blood pressures, assessed psychological
tests for depression and anxiety, and compared before and after
photos. The data was confirming, even though we couldn't control
for all the variables that were co-occurring.
Later, my belief that there
were actually emotional-physical roots for heart "dis-ease" encouraged
me to personally explore the field of other body-oriented therapies,
such as rolfing, energy work, craniosacral therapy, and Reiki. The
more I benefitted from experiencing hands-on body therapies in addition
to psychotherapy, the more I became convinced that my patients would
benefit from them too. I hand picked the practitioners I would be
able to recommend to them in our area.
Before you know it, my enthusiasm
spread into the arena of protecting the heart and body with antioxidants
and other nutrients. The research was convincing. After years of
advising my own family, friends and patients to join me in taking
specific supplements, I found myself involved in product development,
hoping to use my education and experience to develop less expensive
combinations of nutrients that my patients could afford. How did
I trip into that area?
Quite simply, I stared researching
vitamin companies to find better products that I could recommend
to my patients, just like I sought out body therapies to endorse.
Only trouble was, no one was making them, and no one seemed to know
HOW. The last thing I ever wanted personally was to get into a business-type
of field! But, I was being challenged to write down what I thought
was a good antioxidant formulation and get directly involved. It
was back to the books for me! Healing the heart had taken on some
surprising new dimensions I never would have expected when I had
started out!
Eventually, having let go of
a few of my driven behavior traits, I knew that I really needed
more help with my private practice. So I hand picked two younger,
highly qualified associates to take over my varied and demanding
hospital duties. They are both boarded in both Internal Medicine
and Cardiology. Now, Drs. Sun King Wan, F.A.C.C. and Saquib Naseer,
F.A.C.C handle everything from the emergency room to the CCU to
the "cath lab", enabling me to focus my energies on the things that
have come to excite me most: writing, education, product development
and nutritional consultations. These are arenas that have seen few
traditionally trained cardiologists to date, but I hope that more
will be coming on board someday. There is so much work to be done!
In 1997, I decided to
go for yet another board certification: Anti-aging Medicine,
a new and exciting specialty. Those of you who are long time
subscribers of the HeartSense newsletter, have been first
hand observers of my shift into this “brave new world”
kind of medicine. It is a perfect transition, actually. Heart
disease, cancer, and other diseases, such as Alzheimer's,
can all be even better understood as the result of the process
of accelerated or premature aging. One of the key explanations
for these disorders has been the “free radical theory”:
unrelenting free radical damage causes cell damage, mutations,
and the physical sequelae of early aging and disease.
So now the idea of having a
heart center has come full cycle: we want to offer a place that
offers the latest in prevention strategies for the diseases of aging
as well.
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