neurOasis

Here we are, most of us in the country trying to struggle through one of the hottest summers on record, and many of us the worse off for it.  Many medical conditions are made worse by extreme swings in temperature, climate or barometric pressure - especially headache and pain syndromes.  I have a few patients that have fibromyalgia who experience worsening of their pain when in air conditioning.  Many people take advantage of summer weekends to go to a swimming pool, the beach, a park, or just sit around their air conditioned home and read the Sunday paper. 

I have, in the past, done the same thing.  Visit friends on Long Island, go to the ever famous New York street fairs, and take advantage of deals at restaurants that have sparce customers due to the weekend flight out of the city.  This summer, things are different. I am on a mission, and I'd like to share it with you.

I have for the past several months been getting busier and busier, finding myself rising from bed at 5:00am and flopping into bed, asleep before my head hits the pillow, at midnight.  Yes, I am seeing many patients, but no more than usual.  I am so very busy because I have for a very long time had a dream.  It started in 2005 when I attended a mind-body medicine course at Harvard for a week.  Emerging from that course, I resolved to build a center where patients could come and get the care they needed to treat their headaches, pain and other neurological conditions with a treatment paradigm that was focused on them and would allow them to learn how to heal themselves, with the help of traditional medicine and holistic techniques.  I quit my full time job at Lutheran Medical Center in March 2007 and opened my practice, which I have constantly been growing and nurturing to the point it is now.  But I cannot sit back and rest yet. 

I had the notion several years ago, based on what I had learned about the power of meditation, that I could somehow teach my patients how to meditate in a new way.  One that would allow them to heal their brains and recover from years of headaches or chronic pain.  I thought perhaps if patients knew the anatomy of their brains as they meditated, they would be able to train their minds to modify their brains, changing the way nerve cells communicate with each other and thereby effect permanent change and the end or reduction of their pain.

Well, recent research has inspired me to work even harder.  There is clear evidence that patients who know their own brain anatomy, through viewing specialized MRIs of their brains, are able to meditate and heal the damaged pain processing nerves in those areas of their brains.  Imagine!  My hunch was right!  I have worked on a meditation app for the i phone for 18 months and it was recently released to the app store this past May.  I am working now, with the backing of investors (this ain't cheap!) to develop a whole library of apps that will accomplish the same thing.  As technology advances at lightening speed, the coming years will see the development of these types of tools in a way that most of us can't even begin to imagine.  I would also like to write a book about this so that all patients, with or without an i phone, can learn the power of their own minds to heal what ails them - keep your fingers crossed!

So there it is.  My mission.  I KNOW in my heart of hearts that we can learn to treat out brains and bodies with methods that do not include several prescriptions for pills and narcotics.  Yes, there will always be patients who need a certain amount of those medications, but I am sure the coming years will see a new path to pain and headache relief.  And I won't rest until it is realized.