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Welcome to the of psychedelics with our guest, Corina Fratila, an endocrinologist. Join us as Corina shares her journey from growing up in a communist country where psychedelics were stigmatized to becoming a trained psychedelic guide. We’ll explore her first psychedelic experience and her enrollment in the Synthesis program in the Netherlands. With Corina’s expertise, we’ll discuss the ethical considerations of guiding individuals through vulnerable states during psychedelic experiences, the rising interest in underground psychedelic therapy amidst the mental health crisis, and her unique approach to discussing psychedelics with her own children.

Corina Fratila is an endocrinologist.

She discusses the KevinMD article, “Are psychedelics the heroes or villains?”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, and get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome back Corina Fratila. She’s an endocrinologist. Today’s KevinMD article is “Are psychedelics the heroes or villains?” Corina, welcome back to the show.

Corina Fratila: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Kevin Pho: We were talking offline that you last came on about three years ago. And for those who didn’t listen way back then, just briefly share your story and journey.

Corina Fratila: I am Romanian, I am a physician. I went to a wonderful medical school in Bucharest, Romania. The residency exam after medical school was stolen, and all I did my whole life was study. So when this happened, I decided to start learning English, and I left Romania.

That one particular residency exam was eventually cancelled, but I still left, because I wanted more from life than to work and have everything stolen from me, which was kind of like the story of a lot of people’s lives in communist Romania.

A lot of my friends and colleagues left for Europe, some for the United States, mostly Germany and France. But because Europeans in general have an attitude of discrimination towards people from poor countries, I decided to leave Europe. It was heartbreaking.

Then I arrived here, a completely new culture. You know, the type of experience that makes you question all your cultural conditionings, all the beliefs that you grew up with, makes you realize they’re all stories, grown some of them over centuries. Some truths, yes, but mostly stories. How women should be, how men should be, how children should behave, how one needs to live one’s life. I had to examine everything mentally, what wasn’t serving me, and adopt or create new beliefs that would serve me. Went through a pretty hard time when I was designing this belief system, but without role models or people to look up to, I couldn’t really make a lot of sense of what was happening.

Did my residency, my fellowship in New York at Albert Einstein, moved to Baltimore to be closer to the only relative I had in the United States, my sister, who subsequently went back to Romania. Started working in private practice with a group that was aligned to who I was at the time, met my husband, started a family, have two beautiful 13-year-old daughters.

Then 13 years into the private practice I was part of, I realized how much, maybe this is a strong word, but it feels like the truth, how much I despise the American health care, or, like Marianne Williamson says, the sick care system. The revolving door of the medical practice, the incessant prescribing of pharmaceuticals, and the absolute lack of interest in what might be the root cause of the most common conditions I was seeing in my medical practice.

So all that gave me the idea that maybe I can start a different kind of practice, a holistic, integrative kind, where we always look for the root cause, where the relationships are important and valued, where the doctor is not a provider and a patient a consumer, but the doctor and the patient are partners in the healing journey that the patient decides to take. I decided that the authoritarian and paternalistic model was outdated and I was going to practice differently.

My practice was a great success. Even during the pandemic, when many practices and businesses had to close their doors, my practice was thriving and growing. I’m currently full and have a waiting list for my endocrine practice.

But the one thing that I wanted to touch on, the reason I wrote the article, is what happened during the pandemic. And I think that we are all carrying the consequences and still feeling the weight of the years of the pandemic. How disconnected we were from community, growing more children in isolation and fear, and how this has so many long-term consequences.

I won’t lie, I was very afraid. My children were 10 when the pandemic started, and it felt like the sky was falling, that there was no way to turn, that no one had any answers to this tragedy and catastrophe of epic proportions.

So I needed a new framework. I needed to go deep and understand how we got here as humans. But just knowing history, biology, chemistry, pathology, physiology, geography, economics, math, and all these other things I studied in higher education didn’t help me. I needed a framework to help me put everything together. So that’s how I kind of started my journey into exploring the psychedelic realm.

Kevin Pho: All right. So your KevinMD article is “Are psychedelics the heroes or villains?” So tell us the next step. You gave a synopsis of your life story. Talk to us about the transition and your exploration of psychedelics.

Corina Fratila: Oh, thank you. So I think it all started, I read Charles Eisenstein’s book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, and then I heard about Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind. I read that one too, and I felt like that’s exactly what I needed, a mind change. Because my current, at the time, set of beliefs wasn’t helping me understand and make sense of the world.

I was wondering at the time, was I suffering from depression? Was I having like one long, relentless panic attack and I couldn’t find my way out? It seemed like it wasn’t just me, though, it was the whole world that was having one massive anxiety attack.

Then, after reading these two books, I heard about this place in Costa Rica that was helping people kind of make sense of what was going on in the world, with help from indigenous traditions and plant medicine. I booked a retreat there in early 2021, but I was too afraid to go, because it was meeting with this supposedly very powerful plant spirit, with mother ayahuasca, and I was nowhere near being ready.

So then I heard about this other place in the Netherlands, the Synthesis Institute, that was training people in the healing arts to become psychedelic guides. So I signed up. I was like, I need all the help I can get. Conventional medicine and psychiatry and psychology, they’re not helping me, or, as far as I knew, anybody else in the world. So I needed to understand more and to kind of just expand my mind.

So I signed up to become a psychedelic guide, and I did this almost a year and a half training in the Netherlands. Eventually I flew to the Netherlands, I took a psychedelic in a very safe and legal way, in the hopes that all of these areas of my mind and all of the pieces of knowledge would come together to paint a picture that was intelligible.

And I also felt like it was very necessary because I have children. I mean, honestly, I don’t think I would have done any of this stuff without having children, because I feel a huge responsibility toward the future and the legacy that I leave. And I feel like the legacy that I was leaving at that time was of just desperation and fear. It was nothing, not the legacy of coherence.

So through this training I learned about all these healing modalities that have been around, some of them for thousands of years, but they have been pushed to the side for whatever reason. I’m not going to go into conspiracy theories, I’m going to let everybody draw their own conclusions.

And I met people from all over the world, all walks of life, all different backgrounds and fascinating histories. And I felt like, if my life was a tiny creek coming along on its little creek path until then, now this tiny creek was turning into a river, expanding and deepening with all the experiences and the new friends, and I might even say wisdom, new wisdom, lots of new wisdom.

Kevin Pho: So tell me, after your psychedelic journey, how has that influenced you as a physician today?

Corina Fratila: Yeah, so I feel like my whole worldview shifted. I started asking bigger questions about my calling, my role as a human, my role as a physician, as a mother, our roles as humans in the ecosystem of the planet, our responsibility to future generations. I started asking questions about consumerism, interconnection, social justice.

And all of a sudden the fabric of the human world became almost visible, much clearer. The way we built everything on exploitation and extraction, and how colonialism is literally the base of our existence, how patriarchy and the exploitation of women and people of color is the spine of our existence, how conventional medicine has been built to keep people sick, essentially, and coming back for more prescription drugs, and not to make people healthy. And we’re not educating patients about food, about moving their bodies, about rest, community, connection to nature.

So these are all things that I have started implementing and talking to patients more about. I mean, since I started my practice I always considered myself integrative and holistic, and always talked about these things to my patients, but now it’s literally all I want to do. I still prescribe medication every so often, but I’m trying to distance myself more and more from the way conventional medicine is practiced.

Kevin Pho: So tell us about how you discuss psychedelics with patients. Are there specific patients that you would bring the topic up for? Are there specific conditions that psychedelics would lend themselves to? Tell us about how you incorporate that into your exam room.

Corina Fratila: So usually for patients who get stuck at a certain point in their medical treatment, there’s usually some sort of emotional block, some sort of belief that’s preventing them from moving forward with progress. And it’s very interesting, because a lot of patients who get stuck like that, they also have a huge resistance to either seeing a psychologist or acknowledging that there’s some form of belief system that’s in place that’s preventing them.

So I can’t encourage the use of psychedelics at this point, except for what’s legal, which is ketamine in the United States. There’s always the possibility of traveling to places where psychedelics are legal, so I emphasize the legality of everything.

And then I have this documentary that I recommend to patients to watch. It’s pretty dramatic, it’s about significant recoveries that veterans, for example, make from PTSD. And usually it’s people with autoimmune diseases that respond really, really well to some kind of PTSD treatment, if I may say. I mean, it’s a long conversation, obviously I can’t cover everything in just a few minutes.

But I usually recommend just kind of start reading books, watching documentaries, kind of just opening the mind and expanding the consciousness to something else that might be possible for them.

And when people get to see other people’s experiences, people just like them, or people that they consider just like them, they’re much more open to maybe just saying, oh, if that was possible for that person, maybe it’s possible for me. I mean, I know that this is how it worked for me with my role models. My role models were people that were, in what I saw, very similar to my life experience, and very similar in their worldview. And then they would be at what I thought was the next level, and I would be like, oh, they can do it, so can I. And that is possible in every area of our life, not just in the workspace but also for our health.

Kevin Pho: So you run a holistic endocrine practice. Tell us how some of these topics arise when you’re talking about typical endocrine conditions. How do the patients open up to you, and how do you bring up these subjects outside of endocrine that may be amenable to psychedelics?

Corina Fratila: Yeah. So I make it clear from the first time I interact with the patient, which is the first email that I send, that I am very qualified. I am board certified, actually my board certification might expire this month, but I’m board certified in endocrinology, I’ve been board certified twice, I’m not planning to renew my certification but I am as of now. And I’m very qualified in interpreting test results and doing the conventional medical physical exam and just doing all the things that conventional medicine does.

But I am very much into the mind body paradigm, and that if we don’t work on our beliefs, which are truly, our beliefs are what I see as, what I was telling my husband the other day, the genetic code of how we create our reality. And if we don’t do the mind body part of the work, then we’re not going to end up having any results.

So the patients are prepared, they know what they’re getting into. And during the first appointment, usually I go do a complete review of their lifestyle, and then I have a few recommendations to make about how to connect, how to be more embodied, how to feel like, we’re, every day we were given this body, we never asked for it but we were given it, and how do we connect, how do we maintain, how do we respect, how do we treat this body? Not like a rental car, which a lot of us do, oh, I got it, let me just use as much as I can and just give it back no matter what shape it’s in. But treat it with respect, like it’s the body temple where our spirit lives in.

Kevin Pho: Are there any patients where psychedelics are a risk for them? Tell us the type of patients who may not be right for psychedelics.

Corina Fratila: Oh yeah, that’s a very good question. There are people, for example, who are bipolar I, who have serotonin imbalances according to conventional psychiatry, that are definitely not qualified. People with a history of schizophrenia. Sometimes people with very high blood pressure or heart conditions, depending on the heart condition.

So yeah, of course, plant medicine is not an end all be all for all conditions. But it’s very helpful specifically for people with depression, or people with post-traumatic stress disorder, people who feel like they’re stuck and they can’t see a way out, or they can’t see another possibility for their life.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Corina Fratila. She’s an endocrinologist. Today’s KevinMD article is “Are psychedelics the heroes or villains?” Corina, as always, we’ll end with some of your take-home messages to the KevinMD audience.

Corina Fratila: One of my favorite things is to talk to other physicians about what’s possible. Because it’s extremely saddening for me to see how a lot of my physician friends are still stuck in jobs that, like I said, the revolving door type of medicine. And they’re in their golden cage, squeezed between the administrators and insurance companies, and they feel like there’s no way out. They don’t enjoy practicing medicine anymore, they feel like they’re just cash cows for the administrators.

And I just want to say, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that saying, I keep repeating it to everybody I meet, but it’s called, everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.

Like, literally, if you could do one thing today, to forget about the fear and just let yourself imagine what’s possible for your life, just do that. Even if you do it for one minute. Because what’s possible, it’s incredible.

And I’m not saying this to brag, but I’m just saying this because, if I can do it, and I have, I can have this life where I don’t wake up in the morning and hate waking up and going to work. I actually love going to work. My husband’s always like, there must be something wrong with you, loving going to work.

If that’s possible for me, it’s possible for you too, it’s possible for anybody. You can be free to practice the way you envisioned practicing when you were still young and full of joy and dreams. And that’s my take-home message.

Kevin Pho: Corina, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for coming back on the show.

Corina Fratila: Thank you so much for having me.