Sandeep Jahar

for heart disease.

Now, why is that?

I think the reason is that it's so much easier to lower blood pressure than it is to lower emotional stress.

You can take a pill to lower your cholesterol or your blood pressure, but psychosocial stress is just an entirely different beast.

It's interesting that I went through a three-year training program in cardiology and not once

Did we talk about the effect of stress or the emotions on the heart?

So there are a lot of ways to go about it.

But I think the first step is to recognize that there's a problem.

Do you know how long a typical American doctor allows a patient to speak before interrupting them?

About 16 seconds.

I was one of those doctors.

But nowadays, I'll walk in and I'll let the patient talk.

And increasingly, I see that if I let the patient really describe what's bothering them, you can get deeper.

You can get to the sort of root cause of things.

just recently actually learned about a patient who was having heart failure symptoms and all sorts of physical trouble.

And it turned out that he had a tremendously disrupted relationship with his two daughters.

And that grief over that disrupted relationship just came out in the office visit.

He was weeping.

So we actually reached out to the daughters and talked to them about what was going on at his request.

And the improvement in that relationship with his daughters had tremendous effects on his physical health.