I am a no GIST expert, but a fellow patient like you who happens to be a physician - and a psychiatrist who has spent many years (would you believe fifty?) in the practice of academic and clinical psychiatry, laboring in both its private and public sectors. I am an old, but not elderly, married man and a grandfather many times over. Despite an abundance of professional qualifications, credentials and experience, I still have much to learn about my recurrently fascinating, frustrating, and beleaguered specialty in which I have been long entrusted, rewarded - and privileged indeed - to listen to the everyday worries and the most intimate secrets of persons quite often just like you and me.

Over the years, a doctor learns many things in working with patients - things that are not in our textbooks. One of the most important, I think, is that we differ from our patients, as we do from each other, mostly by degree - quantitatively that is, and often not by that much. Some of us have a little less or more of one thing or another, of this and that - perhaps a small aberration, a mutation, an over-expression of one gene or another that can have such elaborate consequences. And so, we often observe and study microscopic and other small differences in the art and science of medicine.

Some neuroscientists increasingly regard our attitudes and behaviors as having been hard-wired in our neuroendocrine systems, rather than how we have been programmed by our environment and past perceptions and experiences in response to life’s events and challenges. Although interested in all such scientific ideas, I have personally tended to listen to and hear my patients more from the perspective of a “programmer”, a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist.

As a psychiatrist and obligatory psychopharmacologist, however, I have maintained a strong clinical interest, rather than any particular expertise, in neurobiology, neurology, learning theory and cognitive science. Medicine, analysis and neuroscience, however, is only a half of where I’m coming from in trying to help you get started constructively in your introduction to psycho-oncology.