Awesome medicine: Entheogenic integrative care for relief of spiritual and existential suffering in serious and chronic health conditions, trauma, and beyond

Scroll down below for link to video and slide deck.

Save the Date: 4/6/21 at 8am, AIMS Co-Director Dr. Aggarwal will be giving a virtual presentation as part of UW Palliative Medicine Grand Rounds. 

It is open to the public and all are welcome to attend.  Log-in info is posted here.

Coined by scholars in 1979, “Entheogen” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: “a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes”. Per Ott (1996) the term is not meant to specify a pharmacological class of drugs…rather, it designates drugs which provoke ecstasy and have traditionally been used as shamanic or religious inebriants, as well as their active principles and artificial congeners. “Entheogenic Integrative Care” is a new coinage to describe integrative healthcare which is knowledgeable about entheogenic use practices in society, promotes their safe and beneficial use, and makes evidence-informed prescriptions and/or recommendations for use of entheogens for therapeutic purposes to prevent or treat disease or promote well-being. This talk will describe the spiritual and existential dimension of health that is necessary to grasp in order to understand the therapeutic applications of entheogens in medicine and the emerging wave of public health, and the ways that entheogens such as cannabis-, ketamine-, and eventually  psilocybin- and ayahuasca- assisted therapies are being applied in an outpatient integrative practice with MDs, NDs, ARNPs, and licensed counselors to relieve existential and spiritual suffering in serious and chronic health conditions, trauma, and beyond.

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Sunil Aggarwal, MD, PhD, FAAPMR is a Board-Certified Physician in Hospice and Palliative Medicine and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and serves as the Immediate Past Chair of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) Integrative Medicine Special Interest Group and was recently named as a Top 20 Emerging Leader by the AAHPM. He is an Affiliate Assistant Clinical Professor in Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, and an Affiliate Clinical Faculty with Bastyr University.  He completed his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Washington and Residency and Fellowship at Virginia Mason Medical Center, NYU Langone Health, and the NIH Clinical Center. He is a Co-founder, Co-director and practitioner at the Advanced Integrative Medical Science (AIMS) Institute in Seattle, a multispecialty teaching clinic and research institute offering cutting edge care in oncology, psychiatry, neurology, rehabilitation, pain, and palliative care.  He also serves as an Associate Hospice Medicine Director and On-Call Palliative Physician for MulitiCare Health System.