Aaron Kheriaty

There is a cure for medicine’s ills, but it’s going to hurt. Effective treatment, as every doctor knows, begins with accurate diagnosis. Making the Cut is about what’s going on in the house of medicine. Medicine got sick. One in three people now distrust the healthcare system. Following the pandemic, two-thirds of Americans doubt medical scientists will act in the best interest of the public. We are grappling with an epidemic of chronic illness—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and chronic lung and kidney disease—affecting six in ten Americans, which medicine seems powerless to fix. The overall life expectancy of Americans has declined for the first time since the Great Depression. Not only are trust levels tanking, the number of doctors is dropping dramatically. Physicians are quitting in droves. One in five doctors will leave medicine in the next two years. One in three will reduce their hours. A doctor, we assume, wounds in order to heal. “You’re going to feel a sharp pain!” she says, before making the cut. Today, though, all too often the doctor wounds without healing. Why? In Making the Cut, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of the country's leading public intellectuals and preeminent bioethicists, reveals what medicine gave him—and what it sometimes took from him. This book is about how he grew from an overconfident pre-med to an ambivalent medical student to a capable physician who had fallen in love with medicine—even if his lover has turned into a prostitute of late. While presenting a damning diagnosis of contemporary medicine, Making the Cut also applies the wounding scalpel in order to heal it.

The coronavirus pandemic conferred enormous power on certain government officials. They have no intention of giving it up. In the space of a few weeks in early 2020, Americans witnessed the imposition of previously unimagined social controls by the biomedical security state--the unelected technocrats who suddenly enjoyed nearly absolute power to incarcerate, isolate, and medicate the entire population. In this chilling new book, a dissident scientist revealsthe people and organizations that form the biomedical security stateits role in the origin of the pandemic and shaping the government responsewhy it is a threat to science, public health, and individual freedomwhat can be done to confront and defeat this new LeviathanWhen covid-19 broke out, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty's work put him on the front lines. Realizing that the mental, physical, and economic toll of lockdowns was catastrophic, he began to protest that the cure was worse than the disease--an intolerable heresy. When he refused vaccination because he had natural immunity from a previous infection, the University of California, Irvine, medical school fired him. He fought back, in the courts and in the media, and has become a reliable source of truth amid official obfuscation and censorship. Now it's time for all of us to fight back. The deadly and arrogant misrule of the biomedical security state must not become the "new normal."

Praise for Transformative Conversations "In the 'superstorm' of writings about the crisis in higher education this little gem of a book stands out like a mindfulness bell. It calls us back to the only thing that truly matters?the energy and wisdom buried in the minds and hearts of dedicated educators." ? Diana Chapman Walsh, president emerita, Wellesley College; trustee emerita, Amherst College; member of the MIT Corporation "This book is revolutionary! It is about transforming the very essence of higher education through the power of authentic conversation, knowing that as the people within the institution evolve, the institution will transform." ? Patricia and Craig Neal, The Art of Convening: Authentic Engagement in Meetings, Gatherings, and Conversations; founders, Heartland Inc. "This is a radical story about how to create a more intimate and relational culture inside the halls of higher education.... for those who long for higher education to return from the abyss of siloed isolation to its original charter as a cooperative learning institution committed to developing the whole person in service of the common good." ? Peter Block, Flawless Consulting and Abundant Community Transformative Conversations offers guidance to help readers create and sustain Formation Mentoring Communities, where faculty, staff, and administrators can speak openly and honestly to the heart of their work as educators and human beings.

Countless Christians including scores of saints have suffered profound, pervasive sorrow that modern psychiatrists call "depression." Then, as now, great faith and even fervent spiritual practices have generally failed to ease this wearying desolation of soul. In these pages, Catholic psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty reviews the effective ways that have recently been devised to deal with this grave and sometimes deadly affliction ways that are not only consistent with the teachings of the Church, but even rooted in many of those teachings. Extensive clinical experience treating patients with depression has shown Dr. Kheriaty that the confessional can't cure neuroses, nor can the couch forgive sin. Healing comes only when we integrate the legitimate discoveries of modern psychology and pharmacology with spiritual direction and the Sacraments.