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Biography
Fredric Schiffer, MD is certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and has been practicing psychodynamic psychotherapy since 1978. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is based on understanding and treating psychological symptoms such as depression, anxiety and/or addiction. For over 30 years now, Dr. Schiffer has pursued empathic treatment for patients suffering from depression, anxiety, trauma and addictions.
His services include Addiction Treatment, Outpatient Buprenorphine Treatment (Suboxone), Detoxification and Individual Counselling. Dr. Fredric Schiffer prescribes medicine where needed, but his primary focus has always been to gain a better understanding of the patient’s emotional struggles and its impact on their daily lives, so as to better treat the issue from its roots.
This approach formed the foundations of his book, “Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual-Brain Psychology,” published in 1998. Available on Amazon.com, this book explores the split-brain studies and the implications of having two hemispheres to a person’s brain. Dr. Schiffer published his extensive scientific research conducted at McLean Hospital.
The book explores how the two minds, each associated with the two brain hemispheres, the left and right brains, sometimes work to sabotage each other and sometimes work in harmony; this may be the answer to unlock the root of emotional problems people experience through life. Fredric Schiffer, MD, is a member of the American Psychiatric Association, Research Associate at McLean Hospital and a Clinical Assistant in Psychiatry, Part Time, at Harvard Medical School.
Since 2003, he has also explored the use of Buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist, to treat opiate withdrawal in order to assist with psychological treatment of opiate addiction. Suboxone® is the first narcotic drug available for prescription from a doctor’s office for use in the treatment of opiate addiction under the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000 and its primary ingredient is buprenorphine, which reduces cravings for opiates without drug tolerance. Patients tend to function well when maintained on buprenorphine as they address their psychological issues in psychotherapy. After working through their issues, patients can taper off the buprenorphine.
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Mental Health Care
Areas of Expertise (4)
Drug Addiction Treatment
Psychiatry
Developmental Biopsychiatry
Dual-Brain Psychology
Education (2)
Harvard Medical School: Postdoctoral Fellow, Cardiology 1975
Drexel University: M.D. 1971
Affiliations (3)
- American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
- McLean Hospital: Research Associate
- Harvard Medical School: Clinical Assistant in Psychiatry
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Media Appearances (1)
Brain may have two minds of its own
Harvard Gazette
2002-04-04
Fredric Schiffer has invented glasses that let him look into some people’s minds. Through using them, he has shown that some patients with depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome see the world differently, depending on whether they look at it through the outer half of their left or right eye. The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist has helped many such patients with the aid of goggles that block either the right or left visual field...
Articles (2)
Simvastatin does not diminish the in vivo degeneration of decellularized aortic conduits
Journal of cardiovascular pharmacology
Assmann A, Horstkötter K, Munakata H, Delfs C, Zwirnmann K, Barth M, Akhyari P, Lichtenberg A.
2014 All present biological cardiovascular prostheses are prone to progressive in vivo degeneration, which can be partially impaired by decellularization. The administration of statins may provide an additional beneficial effect. We provide the first in vivo data on the effect of statins on decellularized cardiovascular implants.
Prediction of clinical outcomes from rTMS in depressed patients with lateral visual field stimulation: A replication
The Journal of Neuropsychiatry
Iain Glass, Jennifer Lord, Martin H. Teicher
2008 In a recent paper, we present extensive data and argue that although many authors have associated the right hemisphere with a negative hemispheric emotional valence, many individuals have a left negative hemispheric emotional valence as a trait. We believe that knowing whether an individual’s hemispheric emotional valence is left or right negative could guide lateralized therapies such as rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Lateral visual field stimulation, as described in detail below, is a simple, convenient, inexpensive method for determining hemispheric emotional valence, which correlated highly with probe auditory evoked potentials, a technique that has been used for the determination of the direction of an individual’s hemispheric emotional valence. Our hypothesis is that activation, with rTMS, of a hemisphere with a positive hemispheric emotional valence should lead to improvement, but activation of a hemisphere with a negative hemispheric emotional valence should not.