Dr. Payton

These are three things that the leader of the “Butterfly Circus” said to the limbless man.  I have recently blogged again about this wonderful short film called “Butterfly Circus.” I was discussing this film with some of my patients who had watched it, at my encouragement. We discussed the statement “of course you have an…

The nocebo effect is the opposite of a placebo effect, so it is a negative response to a sham treatment where the person believes that they are getting the treatment but actually are not. What is amazing is how powerful expectations and outlook are as the placebo response is often close to that for those…

I have recently been thinking about the idea that wisdom is connected to knowing that we don’t know anything. I was aware of this idea from reading that after Socrates was called the wisest person in ancient Greece he at first doubted this until he realized that his wisdom was because he knew that he…

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…