The Frontier Psychiatrists is this very newsletter. Sometimes, I appear on other people’s podcasts. This newsletter is on sale between now and December 1st—75% off on annual subscriptions.
Drew Pinsky is a complex character. I don't know him well before this. He's an addiction medicine doctor. He also went to Amherst College—also my undergrad college—and we discussed that in the episode.
I started listening to Drew in his show with Adam Carolla in the 90s. It was called Loveline. Even as a teen, it was obvious to me that “entertaining content about sex” was a public health show. In that, young people would listen. He began practice with AIDS—back when it was called GRIDS, short for Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Those early experiences of a physician can shape some of us with an evangelical zeal. Drew saw a lack of understanding about a serious, life-threatening condition. To him, that meant thinking about how to educate people. And that, in turn, meant entertainment. He’s done a lot of shows about COVID, vaccination, and its harms that I take some issue with— and I hope I get to talk to him about this at some point. I think we weigh the risks of mistrust differently. I tend to be an error-of-omission (things we don’t do that might have helped) “maxi”—I worry about not helping. Many, and I imagine Drew to be in this cohort, spend time worrying about “errors of commission.” This is to say, the Hippocratic oath we all become familiar with encourages caution and “First, Do No Harm.”
I think this maxim made endless sense for Hippocrates— when our interventions were limited in their ability to help and unlimited in their potential to harm. This balance has, in some fields of medicine, changed. There is still a lot to learn about COVID, its overlap with auto-immunity, the risks of vaccination, the risks of not getting vaccination, and how we live with them. I tend to worry more about the disease itself, and other people worry about the harm we will do with vaccines, with varying degrees of goodwill. I came away thinking Drew was in the “of goodwill” camp—we don't really get into it in the podcast, but we talked about it a bit before and after.
This is among the most skillful interviews of Owen Muir ever. Drew is gifted as an interviewer. He still sees patients, which I respect for someone who doesn’t need to do that. I related to him quite a bit, and always have. It may be because he’s a dead ringer for my psychiatrist.
Of note, the SAINT treatment for depression, which I discuss in the episode, is available at Fermata, the clinic where I work, as part of an open-label clinical trial.