Michael Pollan With Karen Koffler: A Conversation

Karen Koffler, M.D., received her medical degree at the University of Miami and trained in internal medicine at the University of Colorado. She began her career as an ER doctor in a variety of settings, including Indian reservations, the Veterans Administration, and inner-city hospitals, and later helped develop the first “hospitalist” program for Kaiser Permanente in Denver. Along the way she realized that “health care” operated more as a disease management system, and became increasingly disconcerted with the often inadequate approach of medications and surgery to treat diseases already in their later stages. Questioning the status quo led her to being accepted into the first class of physicians trained by Dr. Andrew Weil – the father of integrative medicine – at the University of Arizona. While there she expanded her conventional training to include nutrition, herbs, supplements, mind-body therapies, spirituality, Chinese medicine and acupuncture, and other alternative approaches. Upon completion, she was recruited to Northwestern Medical Center in Chicago to design and run an integrative medical center. In 2006, she joined Canyon Ranch to direct its new health and wellness center at Canyon Ranch Miami Beach. Koffler was able to see repeatedly that chronic health issues could be reversed through changes in nutrition, appropriate exercise, supplements, improved quality of sleep, and skills to handle stress. In her current position, she leads the development of the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Through her work, including clinical, research, and education, her goal is to help transform health care in the U.S. to include a focus on prevention, optimizing the health of patients, and expanding the paradigm in treating illness to include alternative practices. In her personal life, Koffler is committed to what she teaches: Mornings start with a meditation and a beach workout. She eats a mostly plant-based diet, always has coffee, and indulges in the occasional dessert.

Michael Pollan is the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including This Is Your Mind On Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, which conducts research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception and emotion and their biological bases in the human brain. In 2022, he hosted the Netflix docuseries How to Change Your Mind, which based on his books. In This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Books), Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs – opium, caffeine, and mescaline – and our thinking about them. Blending history, science, memoir, and participatory journalism, he examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles. Treating them as drugs, whether licit or illicit, is one of the least interesting things you can say about them, he argues, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can.