Medical Vetting by Timothy McCall, M.D.
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Here are a number of samples of my writing including
the Introduction to 
Yoga as Medicine, and an excerpt from the just-released medical textbook of yoga therapy, The Principles and Practice of Yoga in Health Care, which I co-edited.  Also included is my very first article
for
Yoga Journal — and still my favorite of the many articles I've written for them — about trying to reconcile yoga with modern medical science. It was published shortly after I became their medical editor in 2002. As luck would have it, the very first health article I wrote
was published in the
New England Journal of Medicine 
in 1988.  An article that I wrote  for New Choices, 
 "When Doctors Disagree" won the 1997 National Health Information Gold Award. ​ There's even a poem below, published in an anthology of writing about the Beatles!


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​Introduction to Yoga as Medicine:
A Leap of Faith
In the Introduction to my 2007 bestselling book, I describe my path from practicing modern medicine to getting into yoga and yoga therapy (the application of yoga practices like poses, breathing and mediation to health and healing). 
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Yoga Therapy Referral Guidelines
for Healthcare Practitioners
This book excerpt was published in Yoga Therapy Today, a publication of the International Association of Yoga Therapists.​The chapter it came from was co-written with Leigh Blashki, Subodh Tiwari, John Kepner and Loren Fishman.
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  The Impact of Long Working Hours   on Resident Physicians
Published in 1988, just after I completed residency training in internal medicine at a Boston hospital, this article was a critical analysis of the policy of forcing doctors-in-training to work 36 hour shifts and more than
​100 hours per week. 

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​
Western Science vs. Eastern Wisdom
 ​
This was the very first, and still my favorite, of my Yoga Journal articles. It describes my first trip to India in 2002, and my efforts to reconcile what I'd learned in medical school with what I was experiencing in yoga and yoga therapy. 
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Does Yoga Kill:  Yoga, Truthiness and The New York Times 
This article systematically takes apart New York Times writer William Broad's claims that yoga is responsible for hundreds of strokes per year, the emotional linchpin of his yoga-wrecks-your-body arguments.
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The Language of Healing 
This article lays out the crucial difference between holism and reductionism. Failing to understand this distinction leads many well-meaning people to embrace sometimes dubious alternative treatments or to neglect opportunities to improve modern medical care.

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Healing in a Hurry 
Co-written by health journalist Suzanne Gordon, Healing in  a Hurry appeared in the Nation magazine March 1, 1999. The article, details efforts to save money by discharging patients earlier and earlier from the hospital.
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When Your Doctors Disagree
This article originally appeared in the magazine New Choices and won the 1997 National Health Information Gold Award developed as a seal of quality by the Health Information Resource Center. According to the Mayo Clinic, whose health newsletter won the award in 2000, the organization is a national clearinghouse for consumer health information whose annual awards program is the largest of its kind.
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The Ballad of Aunt Helen
One way I developed my writing chops as I was starting out in the late 1980s, particularly the understanding of rhythm, came from reading and writing a lot of poetry. Here's a poem describing the encounter of my "saintly" Aunt Helen with an angry John Lennon song that I had in heavy rotation the summer after 8th grade.
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          Email: MedicalVetting@gmail.com
© 2016 by Timothy McCall, M.D.