Dr. Dave Rabin

I learned so much about how to help people heal and recover.

But I also realized that for a lot of people, many of the techniques we were taught to use still weren't working.

Like they weren't making a dent and people were still...

symptomatic for life on medications for life having a lot of side effects from medications and there were you know we were taught i think one thing that was really astounding to me is that we were taught not to use the c word for mental illness right the word cure like other all other practices in medicine are able to use the word cure for different things we're not taught to use that word

Really?

Because our treatments don't cure people.

Our treatments stabilize people.

And they stabilize people for life, but people are still sick.

And so, in part, that's why we've seen, when you look at the statistics for mental illness around the world, but especially in the U.S.

and the Western world, mental illness rates have skyrocketed over the last 10 years

Addiction rates have skyrocketed over the last 10 years, and they're not getting better.

They're getting much worse every year, which makes me think and many of my colleagues think, well, maybe we need to be asking different questions about how we're approaching this, right?

Maybe there are other ways to approach mental illness, not from let's just stabilize somebody, but let's get to the root cause.

So when I started to dive into the root cause, I realized that whether you look at Western medicine and what we were seeing in the clinic in our patients, or when I started to look at where Western medicine had gaps, like in the Eastern and tribal medicine approaches around breathwork, meditation, yoga, mindfulness...

plant medicine and psychedelic medicine, I realized that these are all different disciplines that are approaching life from different angles, but through the different lenses, right?

But we're looking at the same thing.

When you, well, taking a step back, when you look at trying to solve these really complex problems of mental illness that are epidemic worldwide now, and you look at

trying to solve those problems from just a western lens or just an eastern or tribal lens it seems really complicated people are confused people don't get better but when you actually look at the field taking like a 30 000 foot view and trying to figure out well what do these different disciplines have in common right what is western medicine in common with eastern and tribal medicine and how are they all how can they all come together

you start to actually be able to put the puzzle pieces together into the solution and solve the puzzle because you have all the pieces.

So I started to look outside the box and study other traditions in the way they, that were much older than Western medicine.