Psychotherapy and Applied Psychology
Jun 8, 2026 · 51 min · 10 segments
Dan is joined by Dr. Daniel Buchman, a bioethicist and scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and an associate professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of…
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Daniel BuchmanGuestDan CoxHost
I've long been interested in, you know, ethical and social issues that arise in healthcare.
I think when, you know, around the dinner table growing up, um, I have a parent who's a healthcare professional and so, you know, hearing things, you know, such as about bowel movements or blood or, you know, sort of things that are happening with the human body or things that are just happening in the healthcare system generally was something that was very much part of my environment growing up and kind of just sort of had a language that we sort of talked about this every day.
Uh, you know, my, my father, uh, who's a healthcare professional, also very committed to issues around social justice and, uh, and other sort of-- and values in healthcare.
And so I think that was very much as part of our, like, again, dinnertime or everyday conversation as well.
And then when I was in, uh, undergraduate, uh, I was an undergraduate student, I was in a program, um, called Social Studies of Medicine.
And within Social Studies of Medicine, we took a range of classes, medical history, medical anthropology, medical sociology, and bioethics.
We were talking about, you know, issues that were coming up in, um, in research, in, [clears throat] in practice, these, like, really thorny dilemmas.
I was like, "This, like, this is a thing? Like, you can actually think about these things and study these things?" Um, we, you know, learned about scandals like the Tuskegee syphilis study or the Willowbrook study or the Nazi medical experiments.
And, you know, aside from being completely sort of appalled of, of what human beings are, are capable of in the name of science, in the name of medicine, um, I was sort of just fascinated that this was sort of an area of exploration.
And the professor I had, um, Dr. Karim Nader, actually, um, he was doing some really interesting work on conditioned place preference, um, and also sort of this, like, this condition- these conditioning experiments where he'd put two rats in a cage and-- or he'd put a rat in a cage and he would pair, um, a light with an electric shock.
And then, you know, the follow-up would be-- And he would measure, like, the, the startle response in the, in the rat or on their paws.
And then he would show, if I've got these experiments correct, a light, and now that's paired with the shock, and so the rat would still exhibit a startle response but not be, not be actually be shocked, right? So this is a classic design, experimental design in conditioning.
And what he was interested in is if there was a way to erase or even eliminate, um, or great- or dampen the emotional impact of these rats' fear memories.
So he, I believe, gave these rats propranolol, which is a beta blocker, and w- actually found when he then presented these rats who had been shocked with the light bef- well, the light and then paired with the shock to just the light, who were given propranolol, they showed a diminished fear response.
This has so many sort of ethical, like, considerations." Like, you know, this was done in rats, which has its own sort of set of issues, but with animals, but human beings? And so as I was sort of, was bitten by this bioethics bug, as an undergraduate, I was very fortunate to get a summer research job at, um, through the Joint Center for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.
And part of that was being paired with a clinical ethicist, so an ethicist who works in a hospital and, um, and follow them around and do someUm, some do some, do like an ex-- like a project for the summer in ethics as an undergraduate student.
So I was, I was placed at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, and this, at the time, I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time, they had the sort of largest concentration of Holocaust survivors [lip smack] anywhere in the world, I think outside of New York maybe.
And I was following, um, Dr. Marsha Sokolowski, who was, uh, the bioethicist there at the time.
Uh, and we were on one of the units, and we walked past this, a room of some... a room of a, of a patient, an older, an older person, an older woman who had advanced stages of dementia and was having flashbacks.
I've long been interested in, you know, ethical and social issues that arise in healthcare.
I think when, you know, around the dinner table growing up, um, I have a parent who's a healthcare professional and so, you know, hearing things, you know, such as about bowel movements or blood or, you know, sort of things that are happening with the human body or things that are just happening in the healthcare system generally was something that was very much part of my environment growing up and kind of just sort of had a language that we sort of talked about this every day.
Uh, you know, my, my father, uh, who's a healthcare professional, also very committed to issues around social justice and, uh, and other sort of-- and values in healthcare.
And so I think that was very much as part of our, like, again, dinnertime or everyday conversation as well.
And then when I was in, uh, undergraduate, uh, I was an undergraduate student, I was in a program, um, called Social Studies of Medicine.
And within Social Studies of Medicine, we took a range of classes, medical history, medical anthropology, medical sociology, and bioethics.
We were talking about, you know, issues that were coming up in, um, in research, in, [clears throat] in practice, these, like, really thorny dilemmas.
I was like, "This, like, this is a thing? Like, you can actually think about these things and study these things?" Um, we, you know, learned about scandals like the Tuskegee syphilis study or the Willowbrook study or the Nazi medical experiments.
And, you know, aside from being completely sort of appalled of, of what human beings are, are capable of in the name of science, in the name of medicine, um, I was sort of just fascinated that this was sort of an area of exploration.
And the professor I had, um, Dr. Karim Nader, actually, um, he was doing some really interesting work on conditioned place preference, um, and also sort of this, like, this condition- these conditioning experiments where he'd put two rats in a cage and-- or he'd put a rat in a cage and he would pair, um, a light with an electric shock.
And then, you know, the follow-up would be-- And he would measure, like, the, the startle response in the, in the rat or on their paws.
And then he would show, if I've got these experiments correct, a light, and now that's paired with the shock, and so the rat would still exhibit a startle response but not be, not be actually be shocked, right? So this is a classic design, experimental design in conditioning.
And what he was interested in is if there was a way to erase or even eliminate, um, or great- or dampen the emotional impact of these rats' fear memories.
So he, I believe, gave these rats propranolol, which is a beta blocker, and w- actually found when he then presented these rats who had been shocked with the light bef- well, the light and then paired with the shock to just the light, who were given propranolol, they showed a diminished fear response.
This has so many sort of ethical, like, considerations." Like, you know, this was done in rats, which has its own sort of set of issues, but with animals, but human beings? And so as I was sort of, was bitten by this bioethics bug, as an undergraduate, I was very fortunate to get a summer research job at, um, through the Joint Center for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.
And part of that was being paired with a clinical ethicist, so an ethicist who works in a hospital and, um, and follow them around and do someUm, some do some, do like an ex-- like a project for the summer in ethics as an undergraduate student.
So I was, I was placed at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, and this, at the time, I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time, they had the sort of largest concentration of Holocaust survivors [lip smack] anywhere in the world, I think outside of New York maybe.
And I was following, um, Dr. Marsha Sokolowski, who was, uh, the bioethicist there at the time.
Uh, and we were on one of the units, and we walked past this, a room of some... a room of a, of a patient, an older, an older person, an older woman who had advanced stages of dementia and was having flashbacks.
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