Judy Tsafrir M.D.

Judy Tsafrir, M.D., is a board certified, conventionally trained adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, with a private practice of holistic adult and child psychiatry located in Newton, Massachusetts. She has a deep curiosity about development and healing, and has an open mind about trying diverse approaches to help her patients. She is forever learning new things.

Tsafrir is familiar with working within a traditional medical/psychiatric paradigm, but am now much more drawn to the functional medicine model. By this she means addressing root causes of illness, rather than simply suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals.

Tsafrir loves her work, which she sees as helping her patients become fully themselves, enjoying optimum health and vitality, and creating and living a life they love. She believes that healing occurs through the integration of heart, mind, body and spirit. It is only through healing ourselves, can we most effectively contribute to healing the planet.

Increasingly Tsafrir have begun to work with many of her patients to help them make the many changes necessary to optimize their health, which will eventually allow them to wean off prescription psychiatric medications or at least to reduce the dosages. This is not always possible, but with a variety of holistic approaches, including attending to the emotional and spiritual dimensions of a person’s life, appropriate diet, healing the immune system via supporting gut health and rebalancing biochemistry, it is often possible.

Tsafrir chose a bridge as the symbol for her practice. She is drawn to consideration and inclusion of disparate contrasting elements in her understanding of people and situations. She likes to keep the past and the present, the traditional and innovative, the ordinary and the sacred, the heart, mind, body and soul all present when she tries to understand a person and figure out how to help. The bridge is also a symbol for attachment and connection, a necessary condition if growth is to occur. Attachment provides the central context in which she works together with her patients to heal them, and clear the way for further psycho/spiritual development.