With legal mandates such as HIPAA governing the handling of healthcare information, exchanging this data can be a complex process. Bellevue-based Edifecs focuses on healthcare data interoperability—the ability for multiple systems to share patient records—aiming to make the healthcare system more efficient for both patients and providers.

Founded in an Issaquah condo by Sunny Singh more than 25 years ago, the company launched on the platform of alleviating friction in the healthcare system by simplifying data exchange. Edifecs’ mission and primary offerings, which include cloud platforms and services for operations, data interchange, and interoperability, are rooted in making this exchange seamless across the entire healthcare ecosystem, from patients to providers to insurers. These systems save hospitals, doctors’ offices, and healthcare companies time and money by reducing administrative costs and providing easier access to patient files. They also help improve care, giving providers comprehensive data to make better-informed decisions. Edifecs serves nearly 300 million people in the U.S. healthcare market.

“How can we use all of that data together to tell a story, so it’s not just bits and pieces?” asks Katie Bunker, Edifecs’ vice-president of human resources. “We’re really doing a great job of simplifying the data interchange between the different payers and the providers.”

Earlier this year, the firm was acquired by Cotiviti, a Utah-based healthcare data analytics company, in a deal worth more than $3 billion. The acquisition will allow the company to offer a “continuum” of complementary services, “from the front of the house right through to the back garden,” explains Bunker.

“As an end-to-end digital data exchange leader, Edifecs has significantly advanced interoperability, enhancing collaboration between payers and providers for better care delivery,” said Emad Rizk, M.D., chairman, president, and CEO of Cotiviti at the time of the acquisition.

And, according to Bunker, Edifecs’ mission for holistic healthcare and wellbeing extends beyond what it offers to its clients. Since its inception, the company has grown to more than 1,000 employees, with half in the U.S. and half in India. Across that workforce, Edifecs takes a comprehensive approach to individuals’ wellness, offering an onsite Wellbeing Center and gym (employees have access to fitness and yoga classes, meditation, and nutritional counseling, daily tea service, communal bikes and kayaks), free biometric testing, smoking cessation programs, and other health-forward initiatives.

“We’re very, very focused on holistic well-being,” says Bunker. “I think we really do live our values.”

The post A Shot in the Arm for Data Delivery appeared first on Seattle magazine.

As science and modern medicine evolve, the human lifespan is getting longer by the year. According to the Global Burden of Disease Study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, global life expectancy will increase by 4.9 years in men and 4.2 years in women between 2022 and 2050. But more years doesn’t necessarily equate to a better quality of life, experts told Seattle magazine. 

“Longer years are not necessarily better years,” says Dr. Gillian Ehrlich, family nurse practitioner and medical director of Neuroveda Health, a Seattle-based clinic focused on Ayurvedic medicine. “Nobody thinks about spending their last 20 years in a hospital on the decline. And I do think that we are declining a lot sooner than we used to.” 

While the idea of living as many years as possible sounds appealing on the surface, a person’s “healthspan,” or the number of years someone can expect to live healthily, doesn’t tend to match the average lifespan, says David Marcinek, PhD, co-director of the University of Washington’s Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in Basic Biology of Aging. “Lifespan is outstripping healthspan,” says Marcinek. 

“The goal of a lot of aging research now is to really drive that healthspan — it’s not necessarily to make people live longer,” says Marcinek. “The ideal is to have a square mortality curve, not a slow decline.”

Quality of life

Though we’re living longer lives, there has been a shift in the kinds of things that are killing us. Humans are less often suffering with communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases, but rather from non-communicable diseases, or those that are often preventable, according to the Institute for Health Metrics. These are diseases like cardiovascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and cancer, driven by factors like obesity, high blood pressure, poor diet and smoking.

So how can we live better lives? You may be surprised to find out the answer has nothing to do with the longevity biohacking health trends sweeping the internet. The real trick to living healthier for longer is deceptively simple: good sleep, exercise, social connection and nutrition, says Marcinek. 

Habits like picking up a sport or hobby, eating fewer processed foods, getting eight hours of good sleep a night and even expanding your social circle can greatly impact your health outcomes later in life. A lot of these changes can be put into place when people are younger or middle aged, says Marcinek, but often aren’t considered until it’s too late. 

“Your health and how you treat your body when you reach your middle age is going to have a big effect on your next several decades of life,” says Marcinek. “That doesn’t always connect with people.” 

There are, however, “a lot of exciting things on the horizon” as far as intervention before declining healthspan takes hold, says Marcinek. One that he is studying is the concept of “mitochondrially-targeted interventions,” or treatments that target the body’s ability to generate new mitochondria. “As you age, your ability to turn your old mitochondria over and make newer ones declines,” says Marcinek. And since mitochondria control “your ability to adapt to stressors,” improving the “recycling” of these cell components can improve health.

“In the last 10 years, there’s been a lot of exciting progress on identifying potential ways to intervene, but they’re not there yet where there’s enough solid evidence,” he says. 

Some longevity treatments draw from eastern traditions, such as Ayurvedic medicine, says Ehrlich. Ayurveda is a traditional Indian healthcare system which treats patients holistically, promoting good health as a means of disease prevention, rather than treatment. 

Neuroveda, which Ehrlich joined in 2019, combines several principles of medicine, including Ayurveda, functional medicine, herbal medicine, regenerative medicine, and naturopathic medicine. The practice starts with neurology because our nervous systems don’t live in isolation — they are deeply connected to the entirety of our being. 

As far as anti-aging, Neuroveda offers personalized longevity and performance programs that include health assessments, testing and treatments such as ayurvedic massage, custom IV therapies, and “plasmapheresis,” says Ehrlich, a process that removes and replaces a patient’s blood plasma as a means of detoxing. 

“Ayurveda really is the original longevity medicine, the original genetics medicine,” say Ehrlich. “My goal as a doctor is to help you live the number of years that you want.” 

David Coll, 62, had tried for years to get relief for his optic neuritis, a condition caused by swelling and inflammation of the optic nerve, after being hospitalized at Vancouver General Hospital for a week with pain in his eye that spread through his jaw, neck and shoulders. Though he worked with a functional medicine doctor, he was prescribed prednisone, which comes with both physical and emotional side effects, he says. 

He finally sought help across the border at Neuroveda, and after four plasmapheresis sessions and stem cell injections for the shoulder and neck pain, he was able to get off prednisone for the first time in over a year. 

“Don’t treat the symptoms,” says Coll. “Find someone that will help you get to the root core of your problem. Western medicine will tell you ‘It’s just old age,’ and ‘take more pills.’ I know there’s a lot of people out there with chronic pain, suffering and taking the wrong drugs.” 

Societal factors

Humans, however, are products of their environment, says Ehrlich. There are many factors to aging that are out of our hands entirely. Things like the environment or zip code you were born in, access to health resources in your early life, and proximity to pollution can all impact a person’s long-term health. Adverse childhood experiences, or trauma that occurs before the age of 18, can impact the diseases that people face as they age. 

“There’s a huge movement recognizing that social and political factors actually determine your health destiny,” says Ehrlich. 

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have some control over our health destiny, says Ehrlich. “I think a common misperception is that aging has to be awful and that there’s nothing you can do about it. I would love to inspire people to take their aging into their own hands.” 

The problem, however, is that “aging doesn’t occur to people until they’re aged,” says Marcinek. By the time many realize they need to live healthier to feel better, the damage has already been done. 

“There’s no question about it — as you age, you slow down. You decline. You’ve got more aches and pains,” says Marcinek. “I think there’s sort of a doom and gloom or nihilism associated with it. But there’s a lot of evidence now that there are things people can do to maintain a productive, happy, connected life well into their older age.” 

The post Live Long and Prosper: The Quest for Eternity in the Emerald City appeared first on Seattle magazine.

Fake health information is all around us, borne from health gurus on the internet, long-held beliefs, or even information once believed by doctors that turned out to be untrue. With the constant evolution of healthcare research, doctors are often combating both old and new medical myths with patients over and over again. “Social media is definitely a breeding ground for misinformation,” says Dr. Douglas Paauw, physician at the General Internal Medicine and Virology clinics at UW Medical Center-Roosevelt.

How do medical myths become so pervasive in the first place? Most people are simply trying to figure out how to stop their pain, says Dr. Peter Olson, physician leader with Swedish Medical Group. And when your health is on the line, turning to the internet for hope may feel like the best option. “They’re just really searching for answers to feel better,” says Olson. “When you understand that, that’s the core reason for them seeking out these potential alternative treatments, I think it gives you a lot more context and ability to work with them to try to solve their symptoms.”

Vaccine disbelief

By far, one of the most common medical myths facing doctors and patients is a distrust in vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy and disbelief has long been a popular frame of thinking, only fueled in recent years by the rise of Covid-19 and the vaccines to fight it, says Paauw. One study of 600 adults in Florida found that, among previously vaccinated adults, 49% of respondents believe that Covid-19 vaccines contain a live strain of the virus, and roughly 40% believe that vaccines can cause you to become sick with the virus.

Even before the pandemic, misconceptions that vaccines cause autism and can make you sick have long been circulating. “I think one super common one is that people believe they can get the flu from the flu vaccine,” says Paauw. “Really the only reaction is, when a person gets a flu vaccine, they’re going to have a little bit of pain at the site, because there’s a little bit of an inflammatory reaction there.”

For a long time, both patients and doctors believed that the flu vaccine couldn’t be given to those with egg allergies, says Paauw. Many flu vaccines are “grown in eggs,” and it was once thought that giving that egg protein to someone in the form of a vaccine would cause an allergic reaction. However, studies over the past two decades have proven that to be untrue, he says. “Trying to help people unlearn takes a lot of explaining,” says Paauw. “We find the same thing with doctors – even when some doctors know it, they’re scared to change, because they say they might get sued.”

Natural always means safe

Just because a piece of fruit has a sticker on it labeled “organic” doesn’t mean it’s actually any better for you than the bargain bin produce.

The idea that things labeled natural — whether it be organic foods, raw milk and dairy products, or supplements — are better for you has been a hot topic among social media wellness influencers for years. “There’s a movement and a cultural craving for things that are more grounded in nature, and I think that can make us biased to labeling,” says Dr. Raj Sundar, family medicine physician at the Kaiser Permanente Burien Medical Center.

However, the concept that something natural can’t hurt us is a lie, says Sundar: If it’s strong enough to have an effect, then it’s strong enough to have a negative side effect. This rings especially true for taking supplements. Sundar notes that some studies have shown high levels of contamination in herbal medicines and supplements, “meaning their chemical composition wasn’t exactly what they said it is.”

And as it stands, this industry is entirely unregulated by the FDA, meaning that supplements companies don’t have to abide by the rigorous standards that regular pharmaceuticals face. Because of this, supplements are “a black box,” says Olson. “We do not know. So when someone says ‘it’s natural, it can’t hurt me,’ that’s not factual.”

It’s just a stuffy nose

Do you get searing headaches and blame it on the weather? Turns out, your sinuses aren’t the problem, says Paauw.

Commonly, migraine variants are mistaken for recurrent sinus headaches, Paauw says, with many claiming they get sinus headaches several times a year. Because of this, many treat their migraines as they would a sinus infection: using antibiotics and decongestants that don’t actually work. In one study looking at 3,000 patients claiming they had sinus headache, 88% of them met migraine criteria.

“There’s a variant of a migraine headache that makes people feel they have a sinus headache,” says Paauw. “It can cause pain in the maxillary area (next to the nose and eyes) and on the forehead, both sides. It’s very uncomfortable.” Then, whatever treatments for sinus infections they’re taking, they feel better after a few days, and attribute their healing to the wrong treatments. In reality, the only thing that healed their migraine was time.

You can sleep when you’re dead

If you are a night owl with an early-morning job, you should probably consider going to bed earlier, says Sundar. Catching up on sleep is actually far more difficult than one would expect.

People can quickly accumulate “sleep debt” that is hard to get rid of, says Sundar. Though people think the weekends are meant for sleeping and resting, our bodies are also clocks that need sleep regularity. That means sleeping 5 hours a night during the week won’t be paid off by 12 hours a night on the weekend. In fact, Sundar says, it can take approximately four days to recover from just one hour of sleep debt. And good sleep is vital to our health: A lack of sleep has been linked to decreased metabolic health, weak immune systems, a risk of heart disease, and worsening mental health.

“We’re noticing how important it is for your health in so many ways,” says Sundar. “It’s more important to go to bed a little bit earlier so you’re getting more sleep every day, rather than catching up for two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday.”

How to avoid falling for medical myths

With how easy it is for information to spread in the age of social media, most people have believed a medical myth at least once — especially if they are simply searching for a way to feel better.

But the question to always ask yourself when encountering medical information on the internet or in the media is: Who is doing the talking, says Olson. For example, if an influencer on TikTok is trying to sell you magnesium supplements, they may spin up information about the substance’s benefits for sleep and stress.

The next step is to look at the opposing viewpoint. Researching why people don’t believe vaccines are safe or why they trust raw milk is vital in understanding what people may be scared of. “I think it’s informative for me to discuss that with my patients — it gives you the contrary viewpoint, to find out where there’s holes in your thinking.”

But if you are hunting for a fix for something that’s hindering your health, the first line of defense should always be your doctor. When approached by a patient who believes medical misconceptions, “listening is the first step,” says Sundar. “Talking to your doctor is a good step, because first is understanding what it is that you’re trying to solve for your health or mental health, understand what tools are available for you, and trying the tools that have been tested,” Sundar says.

The post Four Common Medical Myths, Busted appeared first on Seattle magazine.

These men, the first five employees of her husband’s construction company, all had a “pretty significant criminal history” and had spent time in prison. King admits she had been sheltered her entire life, but learning the backgrounds and journeys of these men opened her eyes.

“We started, very much by accident, employing people coming out of the justice system to help us build buildings,” King says. “The more I learned about them and their history, the more I realized we have to do more.”

Now, as the founder of Pallet, a Seattle company that builds temporary shelters for unhoused populations, King and her firm have made a point of hiring people from unconventional backgrounds. More than half the team have experienced homelessness, substance abuse or the criminal justice system.

Pallet’s shelters are meant to be stepping stones to help people get out of homelessness, or offer temporary shelter in the event of a disaster. These shelters include laundry rooms, bathrooms and dining facilities. The company has 125 communities in 86 cities across 25 states.

In addition to Pallet, King helped found Weld, a nonprofit dedicated to providing services for people exiting the justice system, including housing, employment, education, and health resources.

She adds that the public perception of these groups is often deeply misunderstood. And while regulation and policies can help implement programs to help these communities, the only thing that can change human bias is exposure to different perspectives.

“I have found in my work that the vast majority of people have a false perception about homelessness, addiction, the justice system,” she says. “That perspective comes from a lack of understanding because they haven’t ever walked that road, or they haven’t really known someone who has. We can create public policy all day to protect those populations, but it doesn’t change human perception, or misperception.”

The post Most Influential: Amy King appeared first on Seattle magazine.

Segrest grew up a part of the Muckleshoot Tribe, located just south of Auburn, in a community where the closest grocery store was nearly 10 miles away in an area considered “food insecure.” Her elders often told her, “If I just had access to my traditional foods and medicines, I wouldn’t be sick.”

Segrest has spent the last 14 years sharing knowledge of food systems and helping people in “rekindling their relationships” with traditional food. In 2021, she co-founded Tahoma Peak Solutions, an organization that offers consulting services around storytelling and problem-solving relating to Indigenous communities, as part of that continuing passion.

Tahoma Peak Solutions offers a variety of services, including cultural education, strategic communications and giving, creative direction and food systems planning.

“We want to foster really healthy collaborations, and that means increasing the awareness and education around Native history and culture and how to engage with tribal communities in a good way,” Segrest says.

Tahoma Peak Solutions was a child of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, Segrest and her co-founder, Maria Givens, were working at the Native American Agriculture Fund, an organization that supports Native farmers and fishers, when they realized their expertise could go further than financial support.

“We kept getting these calls and requests from people saying, ‘We want to support these communities, but we don’t know how to get in touch with them,’” she says. “We’d plug them together and watch these partnerships become stressed because the knowledge base of how to engage with tribal communities is limited.”

In just more than three years, the firm has managed to garner a robust client list that includes government organizations across the Northwest, including King County, the cities of Seattle and Portland, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, as well as national organizations such as Deloitte and The Nature Conservancy. Tahoma’s storytelling and cultural education work spans topics such as decolonization, climate resilience, food justice, and health and wellness.

During Native American Heritage Month in November, the firm launched the Native Plants and Foods Institute, which represents a “curation of all the Indigenous food research and writing and developing and curricula” that Segrest has worked on for the past decade.

“As long as we’re able to share that ecological knowledge in meaningful and powerful ways with the next generation, we’re pretty confident that that will help promote sustainable change,” Segrest says.

The work is challenging. She notes that sharing the knowledge and expertise of these communities comes with the risk of tokenization, homogenization and disrespect. But spreading awareness and education of the intricacies of Native traditions across the Northwest is exactly why she does this work.

“We also understand that in order to fight the effects of colonization, we have to make the invisible visible, and so that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing,” she says.

The post Most Influential: Valerie Segrest appeared first on Seattle magazine.

Jacobs sought help from K&L Gates after explicit photos of her were nonconsensually shared on the internet. Jacobs’ case, Bateman says, made her “one of the first people who really made this a cause.”

“We had stumbled into a niche where there were an absolutely unlimited number of victims who had really no way of getting help from lawyers,” he says.

After this experience, Bateman co-founded the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project in 2014, a pro bono initiative through K&L Gates aimed at helping victims of revenge porn.

In the 10 years since its launch, the project has amassed more than 400 volunteers across the firm’s 33 offices, helping thousands of victims across the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. It provides legal advice, assists in removing content from websites, files lawsuits, and goes to trial on behalf of victims.

“We saw there was this incredible need,” Bateman notes. “And it was not such an obvious legal pro bono issue. It took some courage and vision for our firm to do it. But 10 years later, it’s still going on. It’s sort of remarkable.”

For one, getting the word out was initially difficult, and the biggest challenge was “getting victims to know that there was a place they could turn to.” The legal landscape has also drastically changed in the last decade. Today, almost every state has a revenge porn law, as well as a federal civil statute.

Though Bateman is proud of the project’s progress, more work must be done to fix the issue on a broader scale. Social problems aren’t solved by “lawyers doing lawsuits” or by enacting laws, he says. “It really is behavior that needs to change and needs to be taught so that it’s no longer acceptable to do. While we’re helping as many victims as we can, the larger impact of it has to be in getting people to change their behavior.”

The post Most Influential: Dave Bateman appeared first on Seattle magazine.

While the rest of her medical school classmates delivered their final presentations in typical PowerPoint fashion, Ruston was inspired by the “video camera revolution” and the capability of film to portray people’s stories, she said. In the film, she told the story of a family that didn’t want her to tell their mother that she had cancer.

“When I was in medical school, we never used stories to talk about and to explore how to best care for people,” Ruston recalls. “I realized I could do this. I could help people tell their personal stories, to impact other people, for social change.”

Since then, Ruston has made film a core part of her career, founding her production company MyDoc Productions in 2004. Her documentaries focus on topics related to social change, with a particular emphasis on mental health.

“I am passionate about helping others understand that sharing their experiences paves the way for the support they need to navigate these challenges,” Ruston says.

Her recent work includes the Screenagers series, which dives into mental health challenges faced by young people, including the impact of screen time, vaping, drugs, and alcohol in the digital age. The most recent edition, titled Screenagers: Elementary School Age Edition, premiered in West Seattle in October. The films have been screened in 104 countries to more than 14 million viewers.

“It’s really mission driven from my core that people should have access to great care no matter who you are.”

Ruston picks film topics that “come from a place of hardship.” One of her most challenging films, the 2010 Unlisted: A Story of Schizophrenia, grappled with her father’s battle with the condition.

“By nature of picking these hard topics that are dear to me, it means that I’m going to be facing emotional things along the way,” Ruston says. “But at the same time, that is exactly what is healing. It’s the creating something positive out of these hardships that makes it worthwhile.”

Alongside her work in film, Ruston is a renowned speaker on the topic of youth mental health, speaking at the World Health Organization, TEDx, the Aspen Institute, the United Nations and more. Ruston has practiced medicine for 25 years, and has worked for the University of Washington School of Medicine and Stony Brook Medicine in New York state. Now, she works as a long-term locum (fill-in) doctor for Seattle’s Neighborcare Health, offering comprehensive care to underserved communities.

Receiving health care from free clinics in Berkeley growing up made Ruston passionate about giving back as a medical professional. “It’s really mission driven from my core that people should have access to great care no matter who you are,” she adds.

Though film and medicine are two vastly different fields, Ruston’s goal with both sides of her career remains singular: to “serve the underserved,” she said.

“I wish that our highest value was placed on helping people,” Ruston said. “If we valued that interface of humans helping other humans in the way that we value the way money is made, I think we would be so much further along as a society.”

The post Most Influential: Delaney Ruston appeared first on Seattle magazine.

As the founder of Roundglass, an app that helps users work activities such as meditation, breathwork and yoga into their daily routines, health and wellness are woven into the fabric of Singh’s life.

With decades of tech experience, Singh created the company in 2014 with the goal of giving people the tools to take their health, both mental and physical, into their own hands. The company’s app, called Roundglass Living, boasts more than 500,000 users.

“The idea is to enable people to deal with life issues like stress, like anxiety, like difficult relationships, difficult emotions, and create healthy habits,” Singh says. “We deal with all of these things using wellbeing practices like meditation, food, music, journaling, reflection, breathwork, and mix and match them, personalized for every individual.”

Along with its wellness services, the company also operates a philanthropic arm called the Roundglass Foundation. A gift from the foundation helped create the Roundglass India Center, based at Seattle University, in September 2023, which focuses on the research and study of contemporary India and the Indian-American experience.

Singh has spent the last three decades in the Seattle tech community, working in supply chain management at companies such as global logistics company Expeditors and Microsoft, finally starting his own company, Edifecs, in 1996.

Edifecs, a health technology firm that focuses on data exchange and interoperability, works with more than 350 health care customers, providers and government agencies. Singh shepherded Edifecs for more than 25 years, leading it through the early days of bootstrapping and debt to a multinational company worth north of $1 billion.

Singh’s experience has given him a unique perspective on the region’s strengths. He says that Seattle is often unfairly labeled as Silicon Valley’s little sister, but insists that the bubbling tech scene here is collaborative, collegial and supportive for both entrepreneurs and employees. Washington state, in fact, ranks only slightly below California in average annual tech worker salaries, and is also a close second in a ranking of top-paying states for AI jobs.

He adds that the Bay Area’s technology sector often feels like a “hectic rat race,” while Seattle’s community is far more tempered.

“The idea is to enable people to deal with life issues like stress, like anxiety, like difficult relationships, difficult emotions, and create healthy habits,”

Singh notes that while it’s more relaxed than the high-pressure hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley, Seattle’s tech scene has just as much to offer. With major tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and T-Mobile staking their claim, there’s no shortage of talented employees and knowledgeable mentors. The city also offers a substantial venture capital landscape.

“(Seattle) has access to a pool of entrepreneurs that have been there, done that, access to talent, access to infrastructure and mentoring, access to capital — those things are available over here,” Singh says. “If someone said ‘Hey, I love the North- west and I want to start a company here,’ there’s nothing that one will not be able to find here that’s somehow radically different in the Bay Area.”

Plus, the proximity to nature makes it easier to unplug — something that’s always beneficial when working in high- stress environments. “I’m really happy that I’ve spent over 30 years in Seattle,” he says. “I find it to be beautiful. Good people, good nature, and I don’t mind the rain.”

The post Uncommon Thinkers: Sunny Singh appeared first on Seattle magazine.

Through trial and error with several different medications and treatment options, Kopka came to learn that her mental health struggles were treatment resistant, meaning her conditions didn’t respond well to conventional medications. Living in Northern Michigan at the time, “there really were not very many options,” she recalls.

So, Kopka set her sights west. When researching alternatives, Kopka and her husband discovered SeattleNTC, a neuropsychiatric treatment center that offers ketamine treatments (a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects) for depression and mental health conditions.

“We pretty much loaded up the van and headed out,” she says.

Since then, Kopka has tried several kinds of ketamine therapy with the clinic, including IV infusions, nasally delivered esketamine treatment, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Six months later, “ketamine changed my life.”

“Before, it was like, ‘Am I going to go back to the hospital for the 17th time,’ which never helps,” Kopka says. “But I feel like I can always come back to it if I need to, which is a really good feeling. This has been a really amazing journey.”

That journey is just one of many highlighting the numerous positive effects of psychedelic substances such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and others in a controlled therapeutic setting. So far, ketamine is the only psychedelic on the market approved to treat mental health conditions, but clinical trials on the others are unearthing treatment options once thought of as fringe medicine. However, regulatory hurdles, skepticism among many medical professionals themselves, and stigma continue to create significant obstacles to widespread adoption.

A Long, Strange Trip

Washington state, unsurprisingly, is among the national leaders studying the efficacy of psychedelic therapy. In 2021, Seattle decriminalized noncommercial activity around psychedelics, such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and mescaline. Two years ago, the state legislature directed the Washington State Health Care Authority to create a work group to study whether to make psilocybin services available throughout the state. Last year, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill authorizing the University of Washington School of Medicine to study the potential of psilocybin therapy.

Run through the school’s Center for Novel Therapeutics and Addiction Psychiatry, the $1.4 million, three-year study will focus on the safety of using psilocybin (the compound commonly found in so-called magic mushrooms) to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol-use disorder. The Seattle-based trial is set to begin at the start of 2025. Participants will include around 30 to 40 military veterans and first responders with a documented history of these disorders.

For Dr. Nathan Sackett, co-director of the center and head of the study, the potential is limitless. Sackett’s motivation is borne out of frustration with the ineffectiveness of more traditional treatments.

“I was really frustrated by that,” says Sackett, whose interest in psychiatry has always been rooted in the realm of addiction. In researching psilocybin, Sackett discovered its potential to “accelerate the rate of change. Psilocybin has the potential to increase people’s motivation to engage in treatments in a larger way. The experience of consuming psilocybin in a therapeutic context provides an opportunity for people to look at themselves from a different angle.”

Studies show an estimated 5.5 million U.S. adults use psychedelics each year, though psilocybin remains illegal on the federal level. Many of those are adults who “microdose,” or take small amounts of psilocybin on their own to ease anxiety and improve cognitive function.

“Psychedelics kind of act as a catalyst for change and growth,” Sackett adds. “But that’s only going to be helpful if you have the support around you — that’s what separates recreational use from therapeutic use.”

Oregon and Colorado have both passed bills to decriminalize psilocybin and legalize supervised psychedelic therapy. Arizona, California, and Massachusetts have also recently taken steps to ease restrictions on the use of psychedelic mushrooms in medical settings.

Not So Fast

Many medical professionals and groups, however, remain skeptical, including the American Psychiatric Association, which cites “inadequate scientific evidence for endorsing the use of psychedelics to treat any psychiatric disorder except within the context of approved investigational studies.” A study published last year in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology cited publication bias, holes in the approval process, insufficient data, and a lack of empirical evidence.

The National Institutes of Health recently analyzed currently registered psychedelic studies in the American Drug Trial Registry, and concluded that “it is evident that many of these studies are still in their infancy. Many researchers are still facing the challenge of first establishing the safety of hallucinogenic drugs.”

Other studies, however, have shown psilocybin’s promise. Research from Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University has signaled that the compound can reduce conditions such as depression and anxiety, as well as ease smoking addiction. And similar to ketamine, it may be able to help promote neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to change. But magic mushrooms on their own aren’t a wonder drug. The benefits of psychedelics are more achievable when paired with professional and behavioral intervention.

“If the state is going to get involved in potentially increasing access to psilocybin,” Sackett says, “then the question remains, who should have access to it and is it safe for a broader patient population?”

Ketamine has been marketed in the U.S. since the 1970s as an injectable, short-acting anesthetic. In 1999, ketamine became a Schedule III non-narcotic substance under the Controlled Substances Act, and in 2019, the FDA approved the use of certain versions of ketamine for treatment-resistant depression available only at a certified doctor’s office or clinic.

Two kinds of ketamine treatments are available for depression, both of which SeattleNTC offers: IV-administered ketamine and nasal esketamine. Additionally, SeattleNTC offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, in which a patient engages in therapy sessions while using ketamine.

“The model of psychedelic assisted therapy is that you’re taking the person and letting them take the lead,” says Suzanna Eller, SeattleNTC’s director of psychotherapy services. “The goal is for them to take all of their inner knowledge, and then lead themselves eventually to healing.”

This kind of treatment provides an alternative for those that haven’t found success with traditional medications — which happens more often than not. One study from the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine found that only around a third of patients find that their symptoms decrease after their first antidepressant medication. For those that don’t find relief after the first medicine, other conventional prescription medications were found less likely to work on subsequent tries.

While these medications can be a lifesaver for patients who aren’t able to ease their conditions, Eller warns that psychedelics aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. Using these treatments recreationally comes with serious risks, especially if you already have certain conditions or have a family history of some psychotic disorders.

A proper environment is one of the most important factors in avoiding a so-called bad trip — or, as Eller calls it, a “challenging experience.” In a therapeutic setting, the patient can avoid any risks that may come with being in the wrong setting, with the wrong people, or taking too large of a dose. Instead, patients have several sessions of preparatory work to build rapport with their therapist and understand their fears, creating a “safety net” during the treatment to navigate thoughts and emotions.

“There has been so much hype around psychedelics that there are people who are thinking this is the answer to everything,” Eller notes. “A big part of what most people experience when they experience a bad trip with recreational use is usually from having been in a bad setting.”

Dr. Nathan Sackett and Suzanna Eller say psychedelics can have therapeutic effects.

Photo courtesy of Nathan Sackett / Eller's photo by Tiffany Tomkinson

Slow Progress

Though ketamine remains the current FDA-approved standard for psychedelics in therapeutic contexts, research into psilocybin and MDMA (colloquially known as ecstasy) are revealing even more opportunities for treatment. “While ketamine is a great tool, it’s likely that some of these other medicines can provide longer-lasting benefits,” Eller says.

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in June voted overwhelmingly against approving MDMA for use in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. MDMA sits at Schedule 1, which the Drug Enforcement Administration defines as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” The FDA will make a final decision in August. Approving the use of MDMA would make it significantly easier to research the compound, as well as decrease criminal penalties for possession.

“I suspect strongly that the use of psychedelics in a therapeutic context will continue,” Sackett says. “I think there is enough of a need that psychedelics are here to stay. I think the big question is how to optimize those treatments to get the best effects over time.”

That seemingly slow progress, however, must make up for decades of lost time. In 1970, The Richard Nixon-era Controlled Substances Act and the War on Drugs significantly impeded access to psychedelics, labeling substances like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA as Schedule 1 in the first place. Getting permission to study these substances was nearly impossible, says Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, co-founder and co-director of the AIMS Institute in Seattle. That effectively halted research into their benefits for two decades.

“There was a lot of fear and scare tactics,” he says, “and it was unfortunate because there was a lot of research potential that was lost.”

Even though research picked up again in the 1990s and has since accelerated, gaining access to psychedelics still comes with significant barriers. Aggarwal is currently trying to get patients of his palliative care practice access to psilocybin via state and federal Right to Try laws, which allow patients with terminal or life-threatening conditions access to certain drugs before they have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Aggarwal’s request was denied by the DEA, claiming he can only access the drugs as a researcher, but he is appealing the decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Stigma and misconceptions of these substances also make it difficult for many to think of psychedelics as more than just party drugs. The War on Drugs of the 1970s cemented the idea that psychedelics are dangerous and addictive, despite the fact that studies had previously shown the opposite, he adds.

The residual has lasted decades, Sackett notes, leading many to dismiss these forms of treatment. “Unfortunately, there is a large portion of the population that doesn’t fully appreciate that all drugs are not created equal, or that a drug is very context dependent,” he says.

One of the biggest misconceptions, however, is that these drugs have no real advantages at all. The benefits of psychedelics extend far beyond the trip itself. As Aggarwal says, “It will stay with you longer than just that afterglow.”

The post Psychedelic Psychotherapy appeared first on Seattle magazine.

Raymond Tymas-Jones Ph. D. served as the president for Cornish College of the Arts since July 2018.

Photo courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts

Former Cornish College Board Chairman Emily Parkhurst has stepped in as interim president as the board conducts a national search for a permanent replacement. Parkhurst served on the board for five years, two of which she acted as chairperson.

Tymas-Jones became the 10th president of Cornish College in 2018 after serving as the dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah for 12 years. During his tenure at Cornish, he led the college through the Covid-19 pandemic, rebuilt community programs, and initiated a campus unification plan, Cornish Board Chairperson Marianne Francis said.

“We wish him all the best in his retirement and reflect fondly on his time and service at Cornish,” Francis said.

Parkhurst is the founder and CEO of Formidable, a media company geared toward high-level women executives. Parkhurst spent her early career as an adjunct professor at several colleges in Maine, where she also covered education at a newspaper in Falmouth. Parkhurst moved to Seattle in 2012, and eventually served as a reporter, editor, and then publisher at the Puget Sound Business Journal. She is also a former professional musician.

Emily Parkhurst stepped in as interim president for Cornish College of the Arts.

Photo courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts

“The Seattle arts community holds a special place in my heart,” Parkhurst said. “As an artist and musician, as well as a business leader, I see the incredible value Cornish brings to its students and the arts community. I am honored to assist in this transition for this important institution.” Cornish College boasts a student population of more than 500, offering Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in the performing and visual arts, a Bachelor of Music degree, and year-round public programs and extension courses.

Ahead of the fall semester, campus consolidation work has progressed, with the college transforming the Main Campus Center as well as other important classroom spaces. The college has added a wet studio and additional paint studio to support growing student interest, soundproof rooms for music practice, and new computer labs.

The fall semester marks the college’s 110th anniversary.

Note: Emily Parkhurst is married to Seattle magazine Executive Editor Rob Smith.

The post Cornish College President Raymond Tymas-Jones Retires appeared first on Seattle magazine.