After more than three decades in medicine — including years as a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist
and Chief of Anesthesia at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego — I’ve had a front-row seat to both the
power and the limits of modern medicine.

What I’ve witnessed over the past decade troubles me deeply: a steady, accelerating decline in mental
well-being alongside an equally alarming rise in metabolic disease. I don’t think these trends are
coincidental. I believe they’re the same problem, manifesting in different ways.

Chronic inflammation driven by poor diet, excess sugar, processed food, unrelenting stress, sleep
deprivation, sedentary lifestyles, and growing social isolation — these aren’t just risk factors for
diabetes and heart disease. They’re the biological drivers behind the depression, anxiety, and
treatment resistance I see every day.

In 2018, I opened West Coast Ketamine Center after seeing ketamine’s remarkable ability to provide
rapid relief for people who had tried everything else. Over the next seven years, I administered more
than 1,500 ketamine treatments and helped hundreds of people find relief when nothing else worked.

But I also noticed something that changed my thinking entirely: the patients who got the best long-term
results weren’t just getting ketamine. They were addressing the deeper biological and behavioral
patterns that had been driving their symptoms all along.

That insight became the foundation for Seaside Ketamine. This practice exists because I believe
mental health deserves the same rigorous, root-cause approach we apply to every other area of
medicine. Ketamine is a powerful tool — but it’s most effective when it’s the beginning of a
transformation, not the end of one.