Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field exploring the relationships among social, psychological, behavioral factors on bodily processes and quality of life in humans and animals.
Oliver Wolf Sacks, was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in Britain, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. His treatment of those patients became the basis of his 1973 book Awakenings, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated feature film in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American author and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterised as technobabble – "incoherent babbling strewn with scientific terms" which drives those who actually understand physics "crazy" and as "redefining Wrong".
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Massachusetts is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. It was formed out of the 1996 merger of Beth Israel Hospital and New England Deaconess Hospital. Among independent teaching hospitals, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center consistently ranks in the top three recipients of biomedical research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Research funding totals nearly $200 million annually. BIDMC researchers run more than 850 active sponsored projects and 200 clinical trials. The Harvard-Thorndike General Clinical Research Center, the oldest clinical research laboratory in the United States, has been located on this site since 1973.
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) is the graduate medical school of Columbia University, located at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Founded in 1767 by Samuel Bard as the medical department of King's College, VP&S was the first medical school in the Thirteen Colonies to award the Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree. Beginning in 1993, VP&S was also the first U.S. medical school to hold a white coat ceremony.
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill is a 2002 book by medical journalist Robert Whitaker, in which the author examines and questions the efficacy, safety, and ethics of past and present psychiatric interventions for severe mental illnesses, particularly antipsychotics. The book is organized as a historical timeline of treatment development in the United States.
Robert Whitaker is an American journalist and author, writing primarily about medicine, science, and history. He is the author of five books, three of which cover the history or practice of modern psychiatry. He has won numerous awards for science writing, and in 1998 he was part of a team writing for the Boston Globe that was shortlisted for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of articles questioning the ethics of psychiatric research in which unsuspecting patients were given drugs expected to heighten their psychosis. He is the founder and publisher of Mad in America, a webzine critical of the modern psychiatric establishment.
Andrew Solomon is a writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York City and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics.
Abraham Verghese is an American physician, author, Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University Medical School and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. He is also the author of three best-selling books: two memoirs and one novel. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015.
Bernie Siegel is an American writer and retired pediatric surgeon, who writes on the relationship between the patient and the healing process. He is known for his best-selling book Love, Medicine and Miracles.
The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness is a book of case studies of patients by Jerome Groopman, published by Penguin Books in October 1997. It was later serialized in The New Yorker and in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. In 2000, it became the inspiration for the TV show Gideon's Crossing, which was nominated for a Golden Globe.
The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness is a 2003 book by Jerome Groopman. The book was first published in hardback on December 23, 2003 through Random House and deals with the subject of hope and its effect on illnesses.
Narrative Medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients. The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot with characters and is filled with metaphors, and that becoming conversant with the elements of literature facilitates understanding the stories that patients bring. Narrative Medicine is a diagnostic and comprehensive approach that utilizes patients' narratives in clinical practice, research, and education to promote healing. Beyond attempts to reach accurate diagnoses, it aims to address the relational and psychological dimensions that occur in tandem with physical illness. Narrative medicine aims not only to validate the experience of the patient, it also encourages creativity and self-reflection in the physician.
Roger Granet is an American psychiatrist and an author of a number of books on understanding mental disorders and diseases. Dr. Granet is a psycho-oncologist,a psychiatrist who specializes in dealing with the emotional aspects of people who have cancer.
How Doctors Think is a book released in March 2007 by Jerome Groopman, the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
Jacob M. Appel is an American author, poet, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. He is the director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and an associate professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he practices emergency psychiatry at the adjoining Mount Sinai Health System. Appel is the subject of the 2019 documentary film Jacob by director Jon Stahl.
Robert Klitzman is an American psychiatrist and bioethicist.
Donald S. Kornfeld is an American psychiatrist best known for his work on psychiatric issues associated with medical practice. This subspecialty is known as Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry or Psychosomatic Medicine.
Kelly Brogan is an American author of books on alternative medicine who has promoted conspiracy theories and misinformation about discredited medical hypotheses.
