• Gratitude for what keeps us well: walking, breathing, rest, friendship, safety, purpose and for the years of disciplined study that form a psychiatrist: medical school, clinical rotations, exams, and over six years of specialist training.
• What counts as knowledge in medicine - and who decides? Holding expertise and personal sovereignty in the same frame.
• Medicine across civilisations - Babylon, Egypt, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Greece - each emerging from a worldview, none “primitive,” all culturally shaped.
• The rise of the biomedical model - anatomy, cells, pathogens, biochemistry and its extraordinary success in acute care and life-saving intervention.
• Evidence-based medicine and the power of Randomised Controlled Trials - what they measure brilliantly and what they struggle to capture.
• Psychiatry’s measurement dilemma - symptom clusters, self-reported scales, and the question of whether symptom reduction equals flourishing.
• The placebo effect, expectation, relationship and meaning - what actually creates change?
  Ayurveda as the “science of life” - balance, prevention, daily rhythms, and cultivating health rather than only treating disease.
• Green prescriptions and nature-based practice - bridging biomedical legitimacy with relational, ecological models of wellbeing.
• Safeguarding, discernment and humility - widening causation without abandoning rigour, and asking what it truly means to be well.

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com