Martha Stark, MD: "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger"

Martha Stark, MD, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, is an adult and child holistic psychiatrist/psychoanalyst with a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School and in private practice in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr Stark is clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a teaching and supervising analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. In addition, she is adjunct faculty at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School), serves on the faculty of the continuing education program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Harvard Medical School), and is adjunct faculty at both the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology and the Smith College School for Social Work. Dr Stark is the author of awardwinning books on psychoanalytic theory and technique: Working with Resistance; A Primer on Working With Resistance and Modes of Therapeutic Action: Enhancement of Knowledge, Provision of Experience, and Engagement in Relationship. She is currently at work on a book entitled Relentless Hope: The Refusal to Grieve.

Over the past 15 years, Dr Stark has adopted a more holistic approach to the mental and physical well-being of her patients. Her particular interests have become the mind-body connection, the body's capacity to process and integrate the impact of environmental challenge, and the body's connective tissue matrix as a highly ordered array of molecules with the semiconducting properties of a liquid crystal. Additionally, she has particular expertise in the maintenance of an environmentally safe, chemical-free lifestyle.

Dr Stark has presented her ideas at various energy medicine, environmental medicine, and functional medicine conferences. She is on the Health and Medical Advisory Board for The Housekeeping Channel and is a founding member (and Secretary) of the Environmental Health Research Foundation. Dr Stark is on the edito - rial board of the Journal of the American Association of Integrative Medicine as well as the Journal of Clinical Toxicology. She recently became a member of the editorial board ^Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. Altern Ther Health Med. 2 Oil; 17(4): 57-65)

ATHM: Please tell us a little bit about your background and schooling.

Dr Stark: I did my undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where I majored in pure mathematics and studied number theory...