Joy is My Justice: Reclaim What Is Yours
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[00:00:00] Kara Wada, MD: Welcome back everyone to this week's episode of the Becoming Immune Confident Podcast. I'm so excited to welcome back our returning listeners and welcome any new listeners as well. I love bringing colleagues and friends and other experts within the spaces that we talk about. And today I have a really exciting guest, Dr. Tanmeet Sethi, who is a Board certified Integrative Family Medicine Physician and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She has spent the past 25 years working on the front lines of the most marginalized communities as well as globally with victims of school shootings, survivors of hurricanes, citizens impacted by police violence, and psychologists in Ukraine under attack as well.
Tanmeet has created an entire integrative medicine programs like from the ground up, including the first ever fellowship in Washington State, and her expertise is widely recognized both in the local and national work through leading programs on healing from trauma, thought provoking presentations, both medical and non-medical, and multiple articles and textbook chapters on Integrative Medicine.
And I know even before we hit record, there's some other really exciting work that Dr. Tanmeet is doing that I'm excited to maybe dig into too if we have some time. So thank you so much for taking time out, for getting up and ready a little early this morning since we're on separate coasts.
Welcome.
[00:01:45] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Oh, thank you, Kara. I'm really so honored to be here. Thank you.
[00:01:49] Kara Wada, MD: Can you explain, a little bit about your work and how you found yourself in the work you're doing?
The Interplay of Social Justice and Joy
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[00:01:56] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah my work is now also expanded to include a new book, so there's a lot going on there. I'll start from my book only because it actually encompasses so much of my personal and professional life over the last 25 years.
I was pregnant with my third child really on top of the world when I received a death sentence for my second. So he received a diagnosis of what's called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. If people don't know it's an ALS like disease in young boys and it's devastating.
And I have been as you said, a frontline physician and activist for social justice for the last quarter century. And in this one moment, I had nothing left to fight for.
Even the doctor said, by the way, doctors out there don't ever say this, but the doctor said to me, "I'm sorry. There is nothing we can do."
And it was a moment of reckoning really of I knew I could cognitively survive. I don't know how I knew that, but I intuitively knew I could muddle through. But that's not how I wanna live my life. I wanna live my life and thrive and be joyful. I had already started working with individuals in severely traumatized communities, and I, in my primary integrative practice, really, as in medicine if you talk to any of your primary care colleagues we may see people for ostensibly other symptoms, but what we're really seeing is a large sense of disconnection and meaning in their lives.
And so this had been my professional work and now I was my professional work. I really had to figure out what was I gonna do and what I found Kara was that if I stopped running away from this intense pain, if I turned around and walked back towards it, I found something revolutionary and radical, and that was joy.
And Joy is my justice is the name of my book, and it really is my justice because it gave me deep liberation in my body, healed other wounds of internalized racism, and self-hate that had lived on through my life here in the states and really has become a mantra for me for disrupting the mental healthcare conversation because what I believe is that most of our constructs of our life are not happy.
And yet where do we decide that we can still be better? Where do we decide that we can still feel better and that we're not broken? We're just trying to protect ourselves from what we are experiencing. And so now, joy has become my most potent medicine to deliver and to imbibe myself, and really, it is very different than happiness and that is something people don't understand and I feel like our mental health conversation is actually doing more harm by not differentiating those two.
[00:04:51] Kara Wada, MD: Can you help us understand the differences?
Joy as my Justice
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[00:04:55] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah, thanks for asking that. Somewhere where people have been asking me a lot, and it's in my book as well, and what I talk about is how happiness is a cognitive construct. It's an evaluation of an outcome. It's awesome. I'll take as much happiness as I can get.
There's nothing wrong with happiness. The problem is that when the constructs of our life are not happy, then what do we do? Because faking to be happy is not only useful, but it's actually harmful to our nervous systems. So don't toxic positivity and contrived false happiness, those are not useful.
But then what do we do right, Kara? What do we do? Act like we can be less sad. Joy, on the other hand, emerges from the same deep well as our pain. That's our capacity for love meaning connection, belonging. It's actually the reason that we can be at a funeral for a loved one, be deeply grieving and in the same moment, laugh with a loved one about how we either miss them or we're so irritated by something they did.
And yeah, it is the way that joy and pain river flowed together in our body. Joy was always ours to have. It doesn't have to be given to us. It doesn't get taken away. It is merely something we have to allow to emerge. Again, simple but not easy, but it is doable and accessible by all of us, and especially by those of us who are on the fringes of this mental health conversation.
Either because we're in marginalized communities or because we're facing a challenge that's unchangeable. Maybe you have a chronic illness, maybe you lost your dearest one, maybe you're like me and you're watching one of your dearest ones go. Whatever it is that is not changeable, may feel like it is insurmountable, but I'm here to tell you that joy is yours to have.
[00:06:54] Kara Wada, MD: I think that is a message that we rarely hear. So I'm so glad to be talking about it today and to see your work in broadening this conversation too.
[00:07:08] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Thank you. I hope that it will disrupt it.
[00:07:11] Kara Wada, MD: And I think sometimes, I get stuck sometimes in conversations I'm having with patients where I am trying to reconcile the immense privilege that I have in many ways: education, color, finances, support of my family, all these sorts of things. And help to support them as best possible, but also realizing too that I don't have a magic wand to fix all of those things that, that sometimes are not easily fixable.
[00:07:41] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yes, exactly. And actually you're touching on a really good point. I think you have a lot of physicians who listen as well, but patients and physicians, the language we use is powerful, Kara. And as I said, I will never forget that moment when that physician told us that. And I will also never forget the feeling I had in my body of powerlessness and hopelessness.
And I don't know about you, but in medical school, I was actually explicitly taught not to give patients "False Hope", quote unquote. What I talk about actually in one section of the book about hope is that and actually I never, I didn't show anyone my but that's Joy is my Justice. Yeah. Oh, it's so beautiful.
[00:08:23] Kara Wada, MD: Yeah. I love the beautiful, like bright color of the cover.
[00:08:26] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: I have a whole section devoted to hope both in story and Neuroscience. And what I talk about is that I had a mentor who once told me, an integrative medicine mentor, I had to leave medical school to get this teaching, but who said to me, "Tanmeet, hope is never false".
And it was this moment of understanding. And I don't know if Bryan, who's one of my mentors from afar, I don't know him, but one of my beloved idols in the social justice movement. He works towards deconstructing and dismantling our prison industrial complex. And he says something that I think is really powerful.
He says, "If I didn't have hope, I couldn't do this work because hope is seeing the unseen". And actually I would expand on Bryan's work even more to say that not only is it seeing the unseen, but it is never false because to have hope, we must admit that today feels despair. And so it is not contrived, it is actually saying what is here today does not feel hopeful, I am hoping for something different tomorrow, and I'm holding today while I look for that and hope actually in the neuroscience, should we live longer, our hearts function better. It's a powerful tool and for me it's a way to reclaim power in my body. So I never, never tell people not to have hope.
And what I say is what I say to myself, which is
a) to patients who are feeling in the moment of, I've delivered so many horrible diagnoses to people, right? And there is no hope in that moment. And I understand that sometimes I will say to patients, "Until you have hope, I will hold it for you". Having that connection to understanding it's possible.
Sometimes I will say, someone says there feels like there's no hope, I might say something to the effect of, "I know it feels like that, but hope is what gets you up every day. Your body knows it, even when your mind tells you it's not there, just wait until they reconcile". And this notion of hope being false, this notion of this doctor saying,"I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do" is destructive. Because to be honest, what happened in that one moment, in that fell swoop is my dreams of motherhood were completely shattered.
But they were shattered into what I picked up as shards of hope, and now they've been remade into dreams that are far bigger than the dreams I had for my son.
I'm not saying the dreams I had were wrong. I still have those kind of dreams for my other children of college, of family, of beautiful things. But what I have for my other child that now I have for all three are much bigger. Living a life surrounded and buoyed by love, dignity, ripples of compassion, understanding, presence, being grateful for what we are given, and then working into what we need to have.
Those are gifts that are far bigger than I understood.
[00:11:38] Kara Wada, MD: I think it comes back to this conversation about the placebo versus the nocebo effect that our words ha ve that and that really is when we study kind of the science, what we see in the impact of our words and how that shows up physiologically.
[00:11:57] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yes, I completely agree and I mentioned the placebo response in my book because I actually think it's biological power, right? It's your body wanting to heal and believing there's a way to do that. Our body's always been towards the arc of wanting to heal. Nobody wants to be sick, right? But that placebo response, I think is one of the best examples we have, right?
[00:12:23] Kara Wada, MD: Absolutely. That and I've been working to reframe, there's a lot of conversation in social media and so forth about inflammation, and it's the boogeyman and it's actually in the right context, it's healing. It's what helps us heal. It's our immune systems ability to heal a cut or fight, fight and recover from an infection.
And It's when we have too much of it or it sticks around too long that it's more problematic, right? It really is the embodiment of our bodies wanting to keep living and keep surviving, and, yes.
[00:13:01] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Actually, you know this better than anyone in the field you're in, but I use this metaphor in my book of what happens in our body called the Cell Danger Response, where we actually, our cells wall off and say there's danger there.
We are going to take care of this right now and with an inflammatory response and we have metabolic memory of that cellular response. And so when you look at that, you really understand how also we are doing that with our emotions. Our nervous system does that physiologically, there is threat. We must stand down.
We must either fight, flee away, or withdraw. What we do is only in service of our body and we do that. People will say to me all the time, Dr. Sethi, " Trauma is just in our body, so what can you do?" Everyone understands that better now, and I always say, "Yes, trauma lives in the body."
It is true because what your mind and heart cannot resolve, your body will hold onto, but trauma not only lives in the body, it's also where it heals. Let's gently step back into our bodies and try to meet that pain in a different way.
[00:14:14] Kara Wada, MD: And you talk about tools in the book too, about ways that we can maybe utilize our nervous system, our vagus nerve. Kind of in this way too, correct?
[00:14:27] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yes, because for anyone out there who doesn't know about your beautiful long vagus nerve, it's actually the longest nerve in your body and it wanders from the base of your brainstem down through your chest, through your abdomen. And is not only inner innovating so many functions of our parasympathetic or relaxation system, it's also what allows us to engage and connect.
So our ventral vagus, which is our front facing vagus, that's the part of the vagus nerve, that social engagement, connection, oxytocin love, and really I think of it as our front facing to life.
It is what allows us to look at life and say, even when life has not given me what I deserve 'cause none of us deserve suffering, trauma or oppression, but even when life gives us that we have the capacity and power to step back boldly into this world in a different way because we deserve that. Every piece of suffering, anyone listening, every piece of suffering, trauma or oppressive society that you have to undergo, strips you of your power and your humanity and the way to fight back is to reclaim power in your body and reclaiming it through these practices and through your nervous system are not woowoo, they are not about only relaxing, they are about reclaiming a revolution.
[00:16:01] Kara Wada, MD: I love that. I need to venture back there. There's a book I picked up the recommendation in a trauma course I took earlier this year. A book, it's Restoring Practices, I think is the name of it. Big book with a whole bunch of all of these different practices from various cultures and talks significantly about many of the things, that you're touching upon too with the social justice and navigating within a world that for many people continues to strip them of their power.
[00:16:34] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yes. And the truth is, I used to think my social justice work was separate from my joy because for anyone of us who do, who are dedicated to social justice, and hopefully that's all of us, but anyone who is knows that there's a feeling for many of us that if I have too much joy, that's not all right because there's so many people suffering and so I would feel guilty about it.
Now what I understand is that my joy is a liberatory practice. It's actually part of my justice work. Not only is it necessary to do my work better, but it's actually necessary to liberate myself from the chains of oppression. And that in of itself is justice work.
And if all of us, I imagine, what would a world look like if we all reclaimed our power in our bodies? That would be an amazing world. So I really believe they're not separate. They are intricately linked. And now that feels very integrated for me.
Healing Ancestral Trauma
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[00:17:37] Kara Wada, MD: How does healing our trauma and finding joy affect our genes? I know we've talked a little bit several months back about some of the ancestral historical trauma. Just briefly, but how does that all come into play?
[00:17:55] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah, so we have really amazing science now showing how trauma lives in our genes, not just in our bodies, but in our actual genetic code. How that is passed down and Rachel Yehuda's work, I really wanna give her props, there are a lot of people doing this work, but I'm really impressed with how she's brought this field forward. It takes women. But anyway, I really I hope I can meet her one day and just say thank you.
But this sense of how our trauma lives through our genes is real and palpable. And yet I also think of it as there's really no way to prove this necessarily, but I think that has to mean that our resilience lives through our genes too. The fact that my ancestors face so much trauma means that my ancestors knew how to survive.
And so somewhere deep inside me, I do too. We have separate studies that show that actually we can. Completely shift our DNA with practices like breath and food, eating different food with movement, with changing thoughts. It's quite powerful and beautiful, right? We don't yet have understanding of how that works through maybe four, three or four generations.
But if I extrapolate, I cannot understand how it could not, but that will be where the science is going. Now, what I also think Kara though, is that I think about how people, the science isn't quite there yet, but it's getting there. And it's funny 'cause I've taught residents for 25 years and we're very evidence-based and on the science, and I am too. Yeah, I am very evidence-based. And yet I tell residents every time, If it comes to something like this, or a study on which they're well versed, studies on meditation, tens of thousands, now we don't need more proof. But even if there weren't, what I tell residents is the increasing risk of the intervention requires me to have an increasing amount of evidence.
And if there's a new med for diabetes on the market, I am making sure I understand the evidence around that. If you tell me should you meditate, might it help? I'm not waiting for the randomized control trial, but now we have them. But I'm just saying 15 years ago when we didn't have as much, I still said the same thing.
So same thing comes with ancestral trauma. I now know from the science what meditation, food, thought, and movement can do. I also know what we can do to our telomeres. You know that what? How they're shortened by stress and how we can improve upon that. So I think that science is quite powerful. What I also think we can't study, but I really believe, and I talk about it in my book, is how when we move to Joy, when we say we will hold our pain, And still find joy.
It is not about dismissing our pain or our anger or our sadness. It is about honoring that and having moments of joy and ease in between to hold it. When we do that, I believe we heal our ancestry. We even backwards. Now, I talk about stories in my book around that, around my father and my aunt and a cousin who died early before I was born, and who, I don't know what he had, but died at the age of 10 and what he lived through and how my experience with Zubin.
My experience with living it fully and with joy and love and vulnerability and authenticity is healing my ancestral generations.
Resilience Redefined
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[00:21:35] Kara Wada, MD: You've talked a little bit In kind of your writing about, rejecting the wellness's definition of resilience, and you mentioned the word resilience and I like using it in the context of our immune system. So I would love to hear your thoughts on resilience and maybe how we should be using that word.
[00:21:55] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah, I don't think the word is problematic. I wanna read you this one sentence from the beginning of that part, which says, "Resilience is what the world asks of you when you weather challenge, but your justice is in how you choose to answer that .You suffer and yet are asked to then feel good, you thrive, and yet are asked to then do more".
What we say about resilience is that it's, you're resilient if you can get through something, you are resilient in coming back or bouncing back to yourself. Even the Merriam Wester dictionary definition is about bouncing back to normal, and what I am saying is that resilience isn't about getting through and fighting,
it's about living your life front facing in that ventral vagus nerve. So maybe if you are in so much despair right now, maybe getting up tomorrow is your resilience and it is not, I really wanna underscore this.=, It is not about saying we all deserve a trophy. It is about recognizing our resilience comes in many forms.
My resilience comes in saying no to a family gathering where people dismiss my son and tell me how horrible my life is, right? My resilience comes in saying, "This is so hard for me", and if I'm having a hard day and someone says, "How are you doing?" My resilience is in saying not so well. I'm being honest about it.
They don't always want to hear that, but that is the truth, right? My resilience is in taking a day of rest or a moment of rest if I can. My resilience is in crying and saying, "Caregiving feels so hard and exhausting". I don't have to feel guilty as a mother from saying that, and yet my resilience is in being able to hold the two.
I actually talk about, I feel like Kara, I have wielded the term in ways that are harmful in the past now in my understanding and in medical school training in particular, I think we talk about it so much. Oh yeah. About in my work, 20 years of doing residency faculty work. It is a resilient resident is one who can get through residency, who doesn't take a break for mental health, who doesn't complain, and yet the ones who need breaks, the ones who say, "This is hard".
Maybe they are the ones who are resilient, who are honoring themselves. And I actually talk about a study in the book of residents who actually were studied in their telomeres, die 10 times faster than peers their age in college or other professions. And what is that resilience? Because it definitely is not thriving. And I think we need to just understand that we can be resilient, we can have resilient immune systems, resilient mental health, but that doesn't look always as someone who pushes through, who makes it through and does what you expect them to do to put a bright face on.
It's really in how we choose and need to do that. And so I often check in with myself every morning of what I need today for my most resilient self or my most resilient day. Maybe it's that I really need to make that meeting a walk and talk meeting because if I don't move my body, I am not going to be a very happy person later.
So really understanding that checking in with yourself, that is resilience.
[00:25:29] Kara Wada, MD: And it sounds like a lot of times resilience is going to take some resistance against what the culture that we're immersed in may be feeding us. Especially just thinking about medical training, is a prime example, but also from maybe our families or other societal oh, heaven forbid you miss like the PTO thing or whatever, because it just, it's not, yeah. It's just not what you need right now.
[00:26:01] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah. Did you mean PTA.
[00:26:03] Kara Wada, MD: PT. Yeah. PTA yeah. Yep.
[00:26:04] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Oh, I'm a mom. I got that. Yep. Yep. Actually the PTAs were part of my gratitude practice always. They always have been in school because I can't do it Kara. I can't make time for that. Yeah.
And yet it's an important thing. So I support them and I also just give gratitude that there are parents who are willing to and able to do that. And I have a moment of gratitude instead of guilt about it.
[00:26:27] Kara Wada, MD: How powerful. Gratitude over guilt.
[00:26:32] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah, because I had that notion first my mind went to, "Oh my God, I'm not doing it."
Am I, should I not be, should I be working less? Should I be, and the truth is we all have a certain amount of bandwidth and I'm so grateful for all the parents who I think have shepherded my children through the school system.
[00:26:50] Kara Wada, MD: You talk about how loving ourselves is a bold step towards justice. Can you talk about how that is?
[00:27:00] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: So self-compassion has bad PR, I think. So people think it's soft and I'll tell you there's hard science. Self-compassion is actually when we berate ourselves, we are getting into the threat centers of our midbrain.
We are saying stand down, it is not safe out there, even though it's in our mind. And it actually inhibits change, motivation, action. We get out of our prefrontal cortex and executive decision making. We stay in our threat centers of our midbrain when we can shift that to self-compassion. We actually give ourselves a moment of safety, of ease of love that the world is not giving us and so I really wanna shift this conversation around self-compassion to understand that it is deep justice work. It is what allows me to say, even though the world feels like it's on fire most days, I don't know when is this gonna get better And I don't lit literal fire. And metaphoric, right?
Even though it feels like that every day, I can give myself compassion for my anger, my frustration, my suffering, my feeling of inadequacy if I can't attend the next protest movement, right? Whatever it is, if I can give myself self-compassion around that, I am stepping boldly towards the world even though the world has not given me a safe place to be in, I am giving myself a safe place in my body to step in.
And I talk very vulnerably about there's a part of my book where my husband one night, was stretching my son, his name is Zubin, by the way stretching Zubin and broke his femur because his bones are so brittle. And it was a really life-changing moment because he never walked again and he was due to never walk again anyway, as for his disease, but for my husband, it felt like he did it.
And so what do you do in that moment? What do you do? How do you say? I wanna give myself compassion when I actually wish I had never done that. There is a truth there, right? Even though his bones are brittle, this happens in this disease, you can say all you want, and what I really try to show is that there are varying degrees of how easy or difficult it is to give yourself compassion, but there is no way to actually heal that part of yourself that feels like it made a mistake without the compassion to heal it. And there are lots of ways that we can feel like we wish we had done something different.
And what I would say is, "That's okay". And also accept what is here. And that is the only way that you can make change to do something different tomorrow. Actually, berating yourself keeps you in a state of inhibition. So you're doing yourself a double disservice is what I would say. There's actually no definition in Merriam Webster or any dictionary that where accountability includes shame.
We need to shift this whole conversation.
Integrating Psychedelic Medicine
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[00:30:20] Kara Wada, MD: Shifting gears a little bit. You are doing some really interesting work in the clinic now too, and I'd love to talk a little bit about that because there's A lot of overlap in where these are coming together.
[00:30:35] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah. In the last four years I've really moved into integrating psychedelic medicine into my professional life. And so I am a primary clinical researcher at the University of Washington on psilocybin. We just finished the clinical portion of our trial on actually on psilocybin for frontline medical workers, doctors and nurses with covid burnout. And we'll be moving into more trials in the future. That was the first ever at the University of Washington, so we're pretty excited about that one. And then in my clinical practice, ketamine is what I use clinically. Psilocybin and MDMA are not legal yet, so we don't use them outside of research and psychedelics are I've managed a complex mental health population for over two decades, and psychedelics are really the most hope I've had for mental health in a long time.
Mental health and trauma, and they aren't a quick fix. I don't want anyone to think that this is not the next best medicine, but they are a potent catalyst for healing and they are very related, Kara because they have brought my work completely full circle. My work in integrative medicine, spirituality, trauma, social justice, plants, and what I've really found is that psychedelics give us a way to shift insight, a way to dampen that default mode network, a way to get out of that reactive threat center and see our life in a different way so that we can make shifts that allow us to thrive more joyfully. And I am continually astonished by what happens for people. I personally have felt those insights and shifts, even though I have people might say, I would agree that I live my life quite beautifully given the tragedy that's before me, even then in that wasn't a quick, by the way, one day thing, it's a path. So I don't want anyone to think I was born like this. You cultivate this. But anyone, I'm not a superhero.
But even on that path, even though I've gotten to that place and even written this book for people so that they can learn from it, I still have had those kind of insight shifts with psychedelics that really if you look at the literature of what it can bring to people at the end of life through PTSD, I've seen it myself in the research and in practice.
Embracing Indigenous Wisdom
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[00:32:56] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: It's really astonishing how we can not only shift how we think or feel, what I really am interested in is shifting consciousness, and that's what we're doing with this medicine and we are only awakening to it. This medicine has been used for centuries. Okay? So there's no renaissance happening. It's more like a reawakening to the prohibition of what we have learned from indigenous communities for centuries.
And thankfully in the West, we are now learning from what has been known by ancient healers forever.
[00:33:30] Kara Wada, MD: And I think that's important to talk about. Dr. SiriChand Khalsa and I several months ago had a conversation about how do we reconcile the western construct of like evidence-based medicine and also then understanding that many of these ancient healing traditions have their own body of evidence that may be different than the double-blind placebo controlled trial and of course there's no perfect answer to that either, but I think just having an appreciation that we can't just be dismissive of things.
[00:34:16] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah. Alright. And I totally agree and so in this psychedelic field, I'm really trying to have a voice around how, as we create protocols, as we create policies, that those voices of our indigenous elders are held and listened to, that we understand the wisdom of what has been here is still here, and that we cannot understand these medicines only through the clinical trials and only through the pharmacology.
We must understand how they have been used. And one of the biggest Kara, one of the biggest things I think that we need to learn from and the unspoken healing of what I think psychedelic medicine could be if we do it right, is that actually in psychedelics in throughout time, have been used in community.
And have been healed in community, and we have a very individualistic medical model. And not only financially, to be honest, are these not sustainable unless we do them in groups and in community. It actually is how they were meant to be used. And so we need to make sure that we don't just use the reductionist model, that we understand that and as Audre Lorde said, we have only ever healed in community. And understanding that honestly, my hope is that is an unspoken healing power of bringing this medicine back to the West.
[00:35:44] Kara Wada, MD: Oh, that is yes. Healing. It's so interesting to me that when we think about, the stereotypical burnt out physician, like we do we have this tendency to shut down, to shut off.
But what I've realized in kind of my own burnout and other, it's like the leaning in, the having that more human to human connection and community, not only amongst other healthcare professionals, but my patients like that has what been the medicine, right? And it is, it's the human connection is what mitigates trauma.
The Power of Human Connection
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[00:36:17] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Ugh. I really, I believe that 'cause isolation amplifies it. And it's interesting what you just said reminds me of something I talk about in the book, which is that people will often say to me and this comes from a well-intentioned, loving place, I can't imagine. I can't imagine what it's like to be a mother who does this or has this. I take it as a loving thing, but if I have the spiritual energy and bandwidth in the day and I hear that, which is almost every day, then I say back to them, I encourage you to imagine my pain. Because if you imagine my pain, you'll understand your pain better, and we will all connect in this world in a deeper level because imagination is justice.
And when we try to isolate ourselves from others saying, "I can't imagine, and I don't want to imagine", of course you don't. I wouldn't wish this on anyone, but if you could try, what a different world that would be. And I really encourage people to understand that exactly what you're saying, this leaning in, this understanding that imagining what could be is actually power. It's powerful.
[00:37:31] Kara Wada, MD: Yeah. Goodness. The societal ills. We might move the dialogue if we did that a little more.
[00:37:37] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: I know,
[00:37:38] Kara Wada, MD: Thank you so much. This has been a really beautiful conversation. I'm so happy we were able to connect and I can't wait to read the book.
[00:37:49] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Aw, thank you. I hope it serves you well.
[00:37:53] Kara Wada, MD: I think it will. Right up my alley.
[00:37:55] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah, I think so.
[00:37:58] Kara Wada, MD: Where can people find it?
[00:38:00] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah. It's anywhere books are sold. But if you wanted to just get a direct link to all the booksellers and audio book and all that, you can go to joyismyjustice.com. That'll take you right to my book page on my website. And you can find out, you can link there as well to all my clinical services and information if you're interested.
And I'm really active on social media at tanmeetsethimd and I am most active, honestly, on Instagram, but I love people messaging me and tagging me and telling me their takeaways or just having conversations with me and private messages. Really, hearing from readers has been life changing. So it's really beautiful.
[00:38:41] Kara Wada, MD: I could see this being, and maybe I need to organize it locally, but a physician's book club, like just an amazing, for conversations.
The Journey of Healing Healers
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[00:38:52] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah. I just did a book event at my residency where I taught for 20 years. And because they all, they bought 60 books and they said, can you come talk about it?
And the residents were just heart filling and tearful and feeling, "oh, I needed to hear this. I needed to hear this in a way that I haven't heard it". My fellow attendings, everyone was just so moved by it. And I really hope so too. I hope that we can have a conversation in our field because our field is really not well.
We are really hurting.
[00:39:25] Kara Wada, MD: No, and I think, one of the many things we need to do, In this dumpster fire of a system is healing our healers.
[00:39:34] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Exactly. In fact, I'm starting my first group for docs, for ketamine, for healing burnout. Yeah.
[00:39:41] Kara Wada, MD: Cool. That's awesome. We will make sure that all of those are already linked in the show notes so folks can hop over, grab the book, connect, especially if they're anywhere, anywhere close to the Washington area. And and I look forward to continuing this conversation.
[00:39:58] Tanmeet Sethi, MD: Yeah. I'm so glad we're connected. Thank you for the work you do.
[00:40:01] Kara Wada, MD: Yeah, thank you. Take care.
Hey, everyone. I am going to ask you once again to go into Apple podcasts and submit a review of the podcast for me.
But first I'm going to share a review from Dr Lex RX.
"Dr Wada's unique perspective is amazing considering she's both an auto-immune patient and physician. Her experience, expertise and insight make this podcast so valuable. Keep them coming."
One other from Amanda Katherine.
"Wow. So informative. Thank you for bringing more attention to autoimmune diseases. Each podcast is so informative and well thought out. Very impressed with all that you do."
Thank you so much, Dr Lex Rx and Amanda Katherine. I really appreciate the feedback and the review.
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