Skip to main content

Legal Stuff

Legal Stuff

The information posted to this blog is solely the opinions of the providers at Oak Park Behavioral Medicine, LLC and is not intended to replace any recommendations or treatments you are currently receiving from your health care providers.

This blog does not exist to provide mental health treatment and should never be used for any crisis situations. If you are in need of immediate care, please call 9-1-1 or go to your nearest emergency room.

We are not responsible for damages of any kind arising from use of the site or affiliates, or from any information contained therein.

No patient/therapist relationship is implied or actualized through contact with Mind Your Body, Oak Park Behavioral Medicine, Dr. Taft, or our Facebook pages, Twitter account or related affiliates.

We are not responsible for electronically transmitted information, and confidentiality cannot be assumed. Users assume responsibility for any and all disclosures of personal information as the result of correspondence with this site or affiliates and third parties.

We may provide links to other resources. We do not thoroughly check linked websites for accuracy or investigate claims made on other linked sites. We are not responsible for the accuracy of any content published on any other linked site.

Links provided on Mind Your Body are not an endorsement of any other site or other third-party service. Other sites maintain different privacy policies, and it is the responsibility of users to investigate these policies. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on other sites, or breaches of identifying information through these sites.

Popular posts from this blog

So You Have IBD During a Pandemic

Hey! What's going on? Been pretty boring over here in Chicago. Ok I don't need to elaborate on what the hell is going on in the world. We are being bombarded with information - some accurate, a lot inaccurate - about this pandemic. It's very easy to become completely overwhelmed by it all. We've been forced, pretty damn quickly, to completely overhaul our way of life for the greater good. To reduce the strain on our healthcare system of the sick and dying. And us humans are generally bad with rapid, monumental change that we really don't have a lot of say in. Our little reptilian brains do what they're supposed to do (prime us for fight or flight or freeze) but our advanced "thinking" parts of our brain have to interject with all sorts of unhelpful thoughts, thereby sending some of us off the rails. Before we start, turn off the news. Seriously. In the days following 9-11 we found people who consumed more 24-hour news channel information were mor

Psychosocial aspects of having an ostomy

This past Saturday, Tiffany and I had the honor of speaking at the United Ostomy Associations of America's Regional Midwest conference. I was assigned the task of speaking to the patients, and Tiffany addressed the partners or caregivers. I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from my talk. I only had an hour for my session, and with about 100 people in the room, it was not nearly enough time. I love bullet points, so here you go: We are all different! Every ostomate is different and not one size fits all for the emotional/mental aspect either. Who had months to talk about an ostomy and weigh pros/cons? Who was this a more sudden decision for? Who had cancer? Who had IBD? Something else? Who had an ileostomy? colostomy? urostomy? Who has a temporary? Permanent? Multiple temporaries? What age where you when you got your ostomy? Under 20, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60+ Who was single when they got their ostomy? With a serious partner when they had it? Some find a stom

IBD & Medical Trauma

Medical trauma is such an under-recognized issue for the chronnically ill. It's a hard topic to talk about because it can seem like we are pointing fingers at healthcare workers. Maybe that's why there are only, now, 4 studies on the topic in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). If you are someone who treats people with IBD please know I am not here to demonize or criticize. I am both a patient and a GI psychologist. I know the medical system from both sides. I know how messed up and broken it is. But ignoring this or rationalizing it away as only affecting a few folks is wrong. So let's talk about it. Post-traumatic stress (PTS) is the term we use for medical trauma due to technicalities in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTS can be less severe that full on PTSD, or it can be full on PTSD. Regardless, the symptoms are identical: Feeling hypervigilant/on-edge (increased