Raena Morgan: Hi, I'm Raena Morgan with iHealthTube. We're visiting with Dr. Hyla Cass. She's written many books, one of them is 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health. It's a book about women taking charge of their health. She's a practicing psychiatrist. She's also written Natural Highs: Feel Good all the Time. We'd like to talk a little bit with you Dr. Cass about your background and what prompted you to go into medicine in the first place? Dr. Hyla Cass: I was really inspired by being the daughter of a doctor who practiced out of the house, took me on house calls, took me to the hospital. Raena Morgan: Wow! Dr. Hyla Cass: And I loved it! It was my medium. I loved my daddy. It just felt like a very natural thing to be involved with health and healing. Raena Morgan: Okay. Dr. Hyla Cass: And he'd some really good things he would say to us; there were four girls in the family. If we'd hurt ourselves he would do the usual kiss it better, and it'll get better. And those were his words, It'll get better. Raena Morgan: It'll get better. Dr. Hyla Cass: The placebo effect and it works! Because most things do get better. And having that inspiration, that confidence that he inspired in me, oh yeah, it will get better. It will, things get better. And we are so dependent now on pills; you pop a pill. That hurts, pop a pill. His motto, It'll get better. Don't do very much. You just have to pay attention. Then I actually had my medical education. Raena Morgan: Yes, tell us about that. Dr. Hyla Cass: I got a lot of it just right there in my own environment. Raena Morgan: Hands on. Dr. Hyla Cass: Hands on. Then I went to the University of Toronto. I did my undergraduate there and went to the University of Toronto School of Medicine, which was wonderful training, very humanistic, very personally oriented. And the Canadian medical system is also a very good one where there isn't a stratification that we have in the States. Raena Morgan: Okay. Dr. Hyla Cass: I really received excellent training there. And then I did come to the States to Los Angeles where I did my internship. I did rotating internship at LA County USC Medical Center, which was really trial by fire; it was intense. I learned about the gunshot wounds, diabetes out of control, people that were very, very ill, with very difficult situations coming in and I got a lot of good experience, delivered babies, that was wonderful. Raena Morgan: You delivered babies, oh that's great. Dr. Hyla Cass: I did surgery, I mean that was fun. I loved delivering babies, it was fun. It doesn't sound like fun but it really was. It was actually artistic too; they let me sew up. Raena Morgan: So it was medicine as art? Dr. Hyla Cass: I got to do that sort of womanly thing and not leave scars. The guys would do these big, and I would do these gall bladders and just sew very neatly that was my surgery occasion. Then I did my psych residency, my psychiatric residency at Cedar Sinai, which was affiliated with UCLA Medical School, and that was very inspiring. I had excellent teachers and learned a lot about how to do psychotherapy. We weren't as much of a pill pushing institution. We were not doing the big medication thing at that point, it was very much psychodynamic. Then I did a couple of years in child and family therapy, which was very useful. And learning family therapy I learned about systems and the systems approach which is looking at the entire family not just the identified patient. It actually taught me about the systems of how we all interrelate with each other, with our environment, and how illness can happen and how the systems of our bodies interrelate. This interestingly, the systems theory and the application I learned in family therapy, really stood me in good stead in going into the more alternative. Then the alternative route happened really as an evolution of my psychiatric practice. Raena Morgan: As your psychiatric practice? Dr. Hyla Cass: It just seemed right to see what people ate, how they li