Recall that when a month has 5 Thursdays, on that 5th Thursday, our Spirit Mind Body Group holds a meeting of the Guenther Pohlmann Society in our friend, Guenther's honor. For those newcomers to our group and our blog, Guenther was a remarkable human being. He was a member of this group from the very beginning until his sudden demise several years ago. Guenther was born in Germany, and immigrated to the United States when he was a young man. His father had resisted the Nazi movement in Germany and suffered because of this resistance. Yet many 19th century German philosophers made their mark on Guenther. He read and frequently quoted: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and (though Danish) Kierkegaard. He also did a lot of writing about his own world view. He thought that our human brain was "hard wired" for the need for religious belief, perhaps because many of our religious groups and ideas were formed while our early human family lived in a place devoid of stimulation, the Middle Eastern desert. Yet he also believed that even Eastern religions have many similarities to our Judeo-Chrisitan background. I remember him questioning whether even Jesus could have traveled to the Far East, to become affected by some of these similar ancient belief systems. He often quoted Lao Tsu and the Zoroastrians. In addition, Guenther was highly well read in many other fields. He could speak on almost any topic. We always joked at this meeting, if our speaker was not present yet, or we had an opening in presentation, that Guenther would walk in the door, and we would say: "Guenther, can you present something to us today?" and lo and behold, he would! In his field of work, Guenther was known as the "physician's physician." He had a remarkable questioning mind for medicine at its finest. At our weekly Grand Rounds educational meeting at Columbia Hospital, no matter the topic, the speaker knew that eventually during the meeting, Guenther would raise his hand and pose a deep question about the medical topic and then he would often answer the question himself right then. He was a pulmonologist and nuclear medicine doctor who then became an intensivist. He always taught the internal medicine residents at Columbia and also the entire medical staff. He announced his retirement and we had the usual retirement party for him at Columbia, but he never really retired. He still taught the medical students and residents and still over saw various functions at the hospital that kept his figure seen in the corridors right up to his death. Guenther was also an excellent photographer and we have held sessions at this meeting to view some of his photos. He left a volume of writings and we have often used our meeting of the Guenther Pohlmann Society to read through some of these writings. On other occasions we read material that would have likely represented Guenther's view of things, in his memory. Such is the case for this week's meeting. Todd D. led the discussion.
Please read on for the article featured for this meeting: Why We Are All Addicted by Andrew Weil.
