I want to say something plainly at the top. If chronic pain came back into my life tomorrow, Andrew David Shiller, MD is the person I would call. Carolina and I just spent over an hour with him on Episode 002 of In Full Light, and I want to tell you why.
For anyone newer here, I spent eleven years in chronic pain. From around my 29th birthday to about 40. I’m roughly four years on the other side of it now. So when I say I would hire David, I’m saying it as someone who tried a lot of things during those years, who watched a skeptic slowly emerge inside me as one modality after another didn’t deliver, and who had moments where I genuinely thought I was just slowly dying.
David is Harvard-trained. Double board certified. Almost thirty years in integrative and functional medicine, with training in rehabilitation, internal medicine, pain management, and osteopathy. He started out as an engineer in San Diego, woke up energetically during a Tai Chi class one day, and decided he needed to find out what that energy actually was. So he went to medical school. His Tai Chi teacher thought he was crazy.
What’s happened in the thirty years since is the reason I would hire him.
Here’s one story he told us. Early in his osteopathy training, he was working pain management in a 500-bed nursing home in the Bronx because he needed the job. He met a 38-year-old woman on long-term care for brain inflammation from lupus. She was on 300 milligrams of OxyContin a day, a dose that would kill most of us, plus a heavy load of Lyrica. He looked through her file. The inflammation was gone. Something else was keeping her locked in.
He had her lie down. He held her head and listened the way his teachers had taught him. The membranes around her brain felt like cardboard. He waited. He let his attention rest with whatever subtle movement was there. After a while her whole system released, and she stopped breathing for almost a minute and a half. He sat there wondering if she had just died.
Then the breath came back, slow and rolling. She opened her eyes, started laughing, and said, I hadn’t exhaled in ten years. That was the end of her pain. They tapered her off the drugs. She went home.
When you ask David about moments like that, he doesn’t oversell them. He says they took the ideas of anatomy and physiology he learned at Harvard Medical School and made him hold them more loosely.
There’s a moment later in the episode where I tell him about my own pain years and ask what he says to someone who feels like they’ve tried everything. His answer is the most honest I’ve heard a doctor give to that question. He doesn’t reach for a method. He reaches for what’s underneath despair, and he tells the truth that even there, something small is still worth believing.
A few other threads from the conversation:
The framework he uses called the three M’s, and why most doctors only work with two of them.
The concept of “four worlds healing” and why most integrative medicine stops at three.
His take on the recent wave of fallen gurus, and the word he uses for what’s missing: sovereignty.
What he saw in a 12-year-old patient who walked in radiant despite a brain surgery five months prior.
The 25-year vision that came out when we asked him where this is all going, and the part of it he didn’t expect.
If anything in this conversation lands for you, his Substack and drshiller.com are both worth a visit. Tell him we sent you.
If you are just tuning into this series for the first time, last week we were joined by Rachel Connor, and up next is Eva Chen!
And thank you Josh Woll, Nikki Kountouriotis, Claire Machado, Deeanna Burleson, Inge van de Graaf, and many others for tuning into episode 002 of In Full Light w/ Andrew David Shiller, MD and Carolina Wilke!
