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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.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 8, 2015 Working to Recover, or Adjusting to Illness?
A developing body of research supports the idea that antipsychotic medications do not actually help people in the long-term who have psychosis, and may actually trap them in a psychotic state and make them progressively worse over time. People who are not exposed to antipsychotic medication appear to do better over time and to recover. We ask the question why then are antipsychotics the most profitable medications in the US?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 8, 2015 The difficulty of practicing narrative medicine
People's stories about health and disease determine their health behaviors. I begin with an example of a patient whom I told 25 years ago that he had to take better care of himself and who just dropped dead of a heart attack in his 50's. I wonder about how we help people change the story that they are living. How do we help them change health destructive behaviors in a respectful way that honors the story they have brought?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 22, 2015 Can We Reinvent Ourselves?
I ask the question, can we reinvent ourselves? I believe we can by becoming aware of the stories that we have absorbed which tell us how to live our lives. Through our interaction with others, we can modify those stories to become more effective and satisfying. We absorb stories through being born into a family, a place, a culture. We habitually perform those stories because we don't know better.
SHARE Friday, December 19, 2014 Coyote Psychotherapy
We had realization that we could pretend to own the name, Coyote Psychotherapy, which is, as we playfully told people, indigenous inspired, body-oriented, narrative and social psychotherapy, and still a little more, because Coyote can never be completely contained. Psychotherapy has always been a problematic word for me. What indigenous elders do is healing. I'd like to use the term healing, but it has such a New Age feel.
SHARE Friday, December 19, 2014 Finding More Magic
What is magic in a muggle world? We recently conducted a workshop to explore that question. First, what arose was the idea our thoughts could influence the future to which we are headed. What if our visualizations could change the direction in which we are headed. What is really magic is the power we have to influence others. We have power to uplift. We have power to give hope when there is none. This is real magic.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 12, 2014 Finding Magic in a Muggle World
We need to bring magic back into our modern, materialistic world. While ultimately magic will have a scientific description, it will probably take place at the quantum level, which few of us can understand. Therefore, we are left to marvel at the way energy moves matter, at how our participation in each others electrical fields of our hearts creates coherence and even health and well-being. We are left to wonder and awe.
SHARE Friday, October 10, 2014 Bringing Magic Back to a Muggle World
We need to bring magic back into our modern, materialistic world. While ultimately magic will have a scientific description, it will probably take place at the quantum level, which few of us can understand. Therefore, we are left to marvel at the way energy moves matter, at how our participation in each others electrical fields of our hearts creates coherence and even health and well-being. We are left to wonder and awe.
SHARE Tuesday, May 27, 2014 How we treat is more important than the treatment!
The way we relate to people is more important than what we do in both medicine and psychiatry. Randomized, clinical trials of the drug, citalopram, for geriatric depression, for example, showed that where a patient got treated mattered more than what drug they received. The response rate to citalopram varied from 16% to 82% among 15 hospitals. The time is nigh to improve the human elements in what we do be more helpful.
SHARE 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.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 20, 2012 More about Single Payer
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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(9 comments) SHARE Monday, April 30, 2012 Single Payer Health
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.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 14, 2012 The Debate Over Obamacare
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?
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 5, 2011 What we learned from Sundance 2011
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.