Thursday, November 20, 2025
Issue # 255
On Magic Wands and Quantum Toolboxes
By Alice W. Lee, MD
When I was invited to share a little about my work as a holistic psychiatrist, I was delighted—until I sat down and tried to write it. How would I even begin? The problem with describing my work is that I have traveled so far into unknown territory that the conventional psychiatrist I was 23 years ago is as distant to me as the opposite hemisphere of the planet. For the past two decades, I have been interweaving functional, energy, and allopathic medicine into a cohesive healing approach. I had one underlying purpose: creative freedom. I measured my patients’ successes by one outcome: independence from psychiatrists. And my goal? Freeing one patient at a time.
Being a holistic psychiatrist suits my interests. When I took the ACT Interest Inventory in high school, my test scores showed an extremely narrow interest in people and ideas, compared to things and data. My dot, representing where I belonged in the graph plotting every conceivable occupation, was placed in the middle where nothing existed, like an isolated island in a vast ocean. The second time I filled out that inventory, I tried to be less opinionated. But my dot barely shifted. Now, as an energy healer and psychiatrist, my work consists of thinking about people’s thoughts and using thoughts to heal people’s thoughts. I am lucky to have found my niche in the world.
Using Criteria-Based Energy Testing
Early during my exploration of holistic psychiatry, as I struggled to integrate three different approaches to healing people’s thoughts, I learned the importance of having a process to help organize the tools and techniques I was learning along the way. I couldn’t just randomly guess at what needed to be done for the patients.