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Lewis grew up in southeastern Kentucky and attended Indiana University where he majored in biophysics. He then attended Stanford University School of Medicine and completed residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He is currently teaching in the Clinical Psychology Program at Union Institute and University in Brattleboro, Vermont, and has a part-time private practice there. He is the author of several books about integrating narrative and indigenous ideas with modern medicine and psychiatry including Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, Coyote Wisdom, Narrative Medicine, and Healing the Mind through the Power of Story.
Monday, July 23, 2012 The High Cost of Medically Unexplained Symptoms
Medically unexplained symptoms generate high costs of care and are part of what is currently bankrupting our health care system. We need to solve this problem regardless of what type of health care we have. I suggest that we are good at diagnosing serious and life-threatening illness and when none can be readily found, we are free to work in the fertile ground of the misery of life, helping people to reduce their suffering.
Sunday, May 20, 2012 More about Single Payer (2 comments)
In this article, I continue my musings about single-payer health systems. I share my experiences of working within the Canadian health care system as a physician. I describe the back logs we did have and how we got around them, the lack of utilization review, how I could hospitalize anyone at anytime so long as there was a bed open, and how no one pushed me to discharge patients too early.
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Monday, April 30, 2012 Single Payer Health (9 comments)
In this article, I look at possible difficulties of implementing single payer health care in the United States. We review studies that show that the difference in health care costs between the U.S. and Canada are due almost entirely to administrative costs. We look at the administrative inefficiencies that already exist in the U.S. and amply them to start a single-payer system, supporting local control of health care.
Saturday, April 14, 2012 The Debate Over Obamacare (8 comments)
In the Republican view of the world, people have the right to choose not to have health insurance. Who in the world would make this choice except out of poverty because they have no money to buy health insurance? Next they will argue that people have the right to choose to be poor! What would Republicans have us do when people appear in the emergency room dying without insurance. If we are to save them, who will pay?
Monday, September 5, 2011 What we learned from Sundance 2011 (2 comments)
In this article we write about the Native American sundance ceremony as an opportunity to explore voluntary suffering as an embodied metaphorical struggle in which we learn how to approach the challenges of life. We learn how to better embrace uncertainty and to relinquish the idea that we can control the future or even know what's going to happen next.
