Grateful Dead Family Doctor Hat Pins via Etsy

After I published a couple of articles in Relix last Summer, I decided I’d wait a little while before resurfacing with something new.Not too much has changed in the field of psychiatry over the past few months but the remnants of The Grateful Dead are getting back together for a 50^th Anniversary show and The Grateful Doc in me got excited enough to dust off my keyboard.Because I received so much feedback after writing “Grateful Medicine” and “On Being A Grateful Psychiatrist,” I decided I’d share some highlights with the rest of the readers at Relix whom I thought might be interested.

Mark is an interventional cardiologist who wanted to let me know that he has a dancing bear sticker on door outside the suite where he performs cardiac procedures. “When no one’s looking, I touch the bear before I begin a case.Does it focus me?Do I become mindful?Or am I just shown the light in the strangest of places?”Heaven forbid anyone should need an angioplasty but Mark sounds like a pretty cool guy to know if you needed one!

Zach—a psychiatrist in Pittsburgh—leads mindfulness groups centered around Jamband music.A Boston-based social worker who calls himself “The Big Therapeutic” recently introduced an “extra-crispy version of Dark Star from 1977” to his group therapy patients for them to meditate on.Ari is a clinical social worker from NYC who told me that he teaches Grateful Dead jams to adolescents with developmental disabilities “because it works sometimes when nothing else can get them to connect with therapy.”

“Just listening to The Grateful Dead is the best therapy,” wrote a New England psychologist who had told a patient to “put on Scarlet Begonias” instead of lamenting the off-season blunders that her beloved Boston Red Sox had made.Michael fondly recalled a patient he used to work with that had serious behavioral agitation associated with mental retardation.“The guy would calm right down and start peacefully humming as soon as I put on a good Grateful Dead jam.”

Keegan works as a physician in the Emergency Room most days but said she finds “volunteering at music festival medical tents is the most fun I have practicing medicine.”I asked her to clarify and she said, “It’s because I can listen to the grooves while suturing my patients.”Apparently this was a theme—a pediatric thoracic surgeon, an anesthesiologist, and three neurosurgeons told me they listen to The Grateful Dead in the operating room after their patients are sedated and asleep.A local dental student assured to me, “It isn’t just MDs who listen to The Dead once the patients are anesthetized for procedure.Dentists can be cool too.”

Business executives also enjoy The Dead while they work.Two CEOs and a Vice-President for Pharmaceutical Research emailed me to let me know that “Listening to The Dead can lead to increased profits because it mellows people out and helps them think clearly, just don’t tell your clients about it or they’ll stop taking you seriously.”

A pharmacy student named Kevin asked an interesting question, “Could it be that a music-induced declination of norepinephrine leading to reduced stress-related effects as a result of being fully content in the moment? I’m sure the answer is multifaceted and not nearly so simple on a neural level, but I’m interested in your perspective.”I told him that a book called _Musicophilia_ by Oliver Sacks would be a great place to learn more.

Law Enforcement agents were interested as well.A police officer had the idea “to blast ‘China Cat’ > ‘Rider’ out of my cruiser instead of wailing on the siren to calm down rioters after the local college football team lost.”It was certainly an innovative idea but nevertheless I advised him to get the consent of his sergeant before giving it a whirl.

And of course a bunch of people were interested in being my patient and coming out for a psychiatric consultation.Upon further discussion, it ended up that most of them were just looking for medical marijuana including the guy who sent me an email with the subject: _can you get me a prescription for weed?_The funny thing was that his email came from a Colorado-based university which led me to believe that it would be easier to go down to the local veggie burrito/marijuana dealer than to fly out to Boston…especially given that it didn’t really sound like he had any medical ailments to begin with.Someone else asked me if I knew that Peyton Manning had a strain of marijuana named after him which was completely unrelated to anything that I had written for _Relix_ but was still a fascinating piece of trivia.

In short, it was good to be in touch with good people and that was certainly one of the best parts of writing for _Relix_ in the first place.Plus I made a new friend from the experience which was pretty cool.A guy who read my articles and “likes cosmic connections” realized that I have the same name as his old buddy from college and figured to send me an email.As it turned out, he happens to be the Chief Anesthesiologist at a local hospital which reminds me that I’ll have to ask him if he wants to carpool to Chicago for the shows in a few months…assuming we can both get off for July Fourth!

*****

Jacob L. Freedman, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist practicing in Boston, Massachusetts.He is a freelance writer, a suburban mountain biker, and a lifelong Grateful Yid who can be most easily reached at:JacobLFreedman@gmail.com.