I’ve had several patients tell me that they couldn’t forgive people who had abused them but they were no longer troubled by thinking about them. Then a few other patients told me that they were finally able to forgive their abusers and felt more at peace about it now.  So, do we need to forgive…

We own more than 310 million guns [2009 National Institute of Justice report]. This is the most of any nation in the world with India coming in second with an estimated 46 million guns. So, we have more than seven times the number of guns compared to the second place country. We are also the…

In a guest column in the November 5, 2017 edition of the Asheville Citizen Times by Marsha Fretwell, M.D., she has concluded that she might be the last happy doctor.  This is because she had practiced as a geriatrician and thus had only Medicare to interact with as more than 96% of her patients were…

People who threaten others should not have access to weapons. As long as we continue to be obsessed with owning guns, even with the evidence that easy access to guns leads to deaths of many innocent people, it is critical that we put safeguards in place to protect innocent people from potentially dangerous people. The…

When I was looking at the acknowledgments at the beginning of a book by Kate DiCamillo called The Tiger Rising, I noticed that the acknowledgments ended with thanking a specific person for “believing that I could and that I can. And that I will.”I rarely look at this section of a book but I did this time and…

It is time for us [Americans] to take action to keep our children safe [and thus reduce the rate that our children die]. An opinion piece in the February 18, 2028 New York Times by David Leonhardt reports that the United States is now “the most dangerous of affluent nations for a child to be…

I wonder if most of us have had the experience of changing an answer on a test and finding out that we changed a right answer to a wrong anwer.  It is actually hard for some people to stop doing this as they feel that they have the correct answer after thinking about the question…

With reference to chaos theory, the butterfly effect refers to the phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere [Dictionary: In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result…

Suicide continues to increase in the United States. I have no doubt that this is directly related to increased stress in the lives of those who have died by suicide. I also believe that a major factor in their decision to harm themselves was feeling alone and isolated. So, they felt disconnected from others and…

For a couple of years I have been prescribing low doses of lithium carbonate to help people with PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] not react as much to past traumatic experiences when they are recalled.  Those who respond report feeling less anxious and less reactive when they think about past stressful events. It is like…