About Jeff Taekman, MD

For years I stood in operating rooms at Duke watching a patient's vital signs while my own were quietly abnormal. I had Crohn's disease, diagnosed at Duke in 2006 during an admission that required a blood transfusion, and I told almost no one. A shift meant walking about six miles between pre-op, the operating rooms, and recovery. The pain usually arrived after lunch.

I am Professor Emeritus of Anesthesiology at Duke University, where I served 17 years as Assistant Dean for Educational Technology and founded the Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center. My research was on simulation, patient safety, and how clinicians learn, supported by more than $10 million in federal funding.

My illness sent me outside my specialty. I read papers on inflammatory bowel disease that kept describing the same disrupted pattern of gut bacteria. Following them led me to a change in diet, then to sleep, stress, and movement, and I have been off all medication since 2015. In 2018 I completed the 1,000-hour fellowship at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

What HealthHippieMD is

HealthHippieMD is where I keep doing that reading. Each week I go through recent work in medicine, neuroscience, psychology, nutrition, and technology, and write up what the studies found, who published them, and where the evidence is thin. The free edition carries two or three of those summaries. The paid edition carries the full set, and it is where I connect findings that were published separately and rarely read together.

Everything is sorted by the nine dimensions of wellness: Physical, Emotional, Intellectual, Social, Existential, Occupational & Purpose, Financial, Environmental, and Creative. Before I found my way out, the disease had narrowed my work and my social life, and the recovery ran through more than one dimension at a time.

Who reads it

Mostly two groups. The first is people managing their own health, often a chronic condition, who feel caught between dismissive skepticism and uncritical wellness hype. The second is clinicians, nutritionists, therapists, and educators who want the research on integrative medicine, the microbiome, sleep, pain, and mental health without reading every journal themselves. Several of them have told me it is how they stay current.

I have followed questions across disciplines for most of my career, from academic medicine into virtual reality simulation, and lately into AI-generated music and what it shows about creativity and emotional processing. Some of that ends up in the newsletter too.

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Working with me

One-on-one sessions

One hour on Zoom, $197. Two tracks: integrative wellness, using your Nine Dimensions results to decide where to focus, and personal knowledge management with Zettelkasten, for academics and writers who want a working system for their ideas. Coaching and education, not a physician-patient relationship.

Book a session

Teams and organizations

I run Nine Dimensions workshops for professional firms. Your people take the Well-IQ assessment privately, and I present the aggregate results to the team with evidence-based ways to improve them. I also license the framework and assessment to organizations and practitioners. A 15-minute conversation is the place to start.

Email Jeff

Elsewhere

jeffreytaekman.com · LinkedIn · ResearchGate · Scholars@Duke · Google Scholar

How I write

I write with the help of Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, which I use to pressure-test arguments, edit prose, and tighten structure. The topics, judgments, and sources are mine, and I check clinical and scientific claims against the primary literature before publishing. When a piece relied on AI more than usual, I say so at the end of it.