The Bridge Between Traditional Medicine and Intuition
Intuitive medicine has progressed so far in the last decade and I am honored to be a part of that progress. I pride myself on being a bridge between traditional medicine and intuition, and discuss this in my book, Second Sight.
Luckily, I’ve had many angels in human form who’ve pointed me to my true calling as physician. In the sixties I got heavily involved with drugs in an attempt to block my intuitions out—not something I’m recommending to you! Following a nearly fatal car accident at age sixteen when I tumbled over a treacherous 1500 foot cliff in Malibu Canyon, my parents forced me to see a psychiatrist. This man was the first person who ever “saw” me–not who he wanted me to be, but who I was. He taught me to begin to value the gift of intuition, and referred me to Dr. Thelma Moss, a intuition researcher at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. She was to become my mentor and guide to developing my intuitive side.
While working in Thelma’s lab I had an amazingly specific dream which announced, “You’re going to become an MD, a psychiatrist, to help legitimize intuition in medicine.” When I awoke, I felt like someone was playing a practical joke on me. I’d never liked science, and I was bored around all my parent’s doctor-friends. I was a hippie living in an old converted brick Laundromat with my artist-boyfriend in Venice Beach, working in the May Company’s towel department. (I’ve had a great love of towels and sheets since!) The last thing I envisioned doing was medicine. But because I was beginning to trust my intuition, I enrolled in a junior college just to see how it would go. So one course became two, became fourteen years of medical training–USC medical school and a UCLA psychiatric internship and residency.
When I opened my Los Angeles psychiatric practice in 1983, I had every intention of it being traditional; I’d use medications, psychotherapy, but I didn’t intend for intuition to play a role. My practice was extremely successful. Since I was a workaholic and also loved helping people, I had twelve hour days, though very little personal life. But then I had a heart-wrenching wake-up call that changed everything. It was an intuition that a patient, on antidepressants, was going to make a suicide attempt. Because she was doing so well–nothing supported my hunch–I dismissed it. Within a week she overdosed on the antidepressants I’d prescribed and ended up in a coma for nearly a month. (Had she not survived I would’ve been devastated.) The hardest part, though, was that I thought I’d harmed her by not utilizing a vital piece of intuitive information. This was intolerable for me. From then on, I knew, as a responsible physician, I had to integrate my intuitions into my work.