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ST on Health: Getting to Know Dr. Michael Finkelstein and His Concept of "Slow Medicine"

Aired on Thursday, February 5th.

On this installment of StudioTulsa on Health, guest host John Schumann speaks with Michael Finkelstein, MD, the so-called "Slow Medicine Doctor," who's been featured in The New York Times, on CNN, at the Huffington Post website, and so forth, and whose recently issued paperback is "Slow Medicine: Hope and Healing for Chronic Illness." As Dr. Finkelstein notes, just as the idea of slow food is about more than food itself -- it's about the entire experience of a meal, for example, and about all the ingredients, associations, flavors, and personal contacts that figure into "sustenance" -- so does the idea of slow medicine concern more than just medicine. In the tradition of Mehmet Oz or Andrew Weil -- the latter of whom was actually a teacher of Finkelstein's, when he was completing an associate fellowship in integrative medicine -- our guest on today's SToH argues that caring for a patient (or for one's self, for that matter) doesn't always mean treating this or that ailment with this or that medication. It's about taking a "holistic" approach -- about truly and fully considering a given patient's mind, body, and soul. Moreover, Finkelstein tells Schumann that the same micro-as-well-as-macro perspective that his method applies to healing individual patients can and should be applied to American health care as a whole.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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