Dr. Pewter, Dr. Distolberg, and Jesse Allen have no conflicts of interest to report.

All right, welcome back to the podcast.

I am joined today with, I would like to say my boss, one of my bosses, I have many bosses.

All of you as listeners are my bosses, I guess.

But Brian Distolberg, he is a PhD, Merge of Family Therapist, and he runs the MEND program

in Loma Linda, California.

He's the head of the department, both the child and adolescent and adult, and he is in charge

of all the research and teaches at the University.

So Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

And we're also joined with Jesse Allen, one of my favorite therapists in the world, and

Jesse is trained in the MEND model.

She's been working with me for many years, and MEND is an IOP partial program, which

means five to three days a week, seven to three hours a day, depending on if they're

partial, partial is more intensive, then we graduate them to IOP.

And people who get referred here have medical and psychiatric issues.

It's an insurance-based program, and we accept most insurances, I would say, pretty much

all of them at this point, which we've had to fight tooth and nail to be able to do.

And so today, I was hoping to have a conversation around the research that we've published on

the MEND program, and a practical sort of understanding of things we've learned about

treating people with medical issues.

We'll talk about what is congruence, why we do family therapy, we do family therapy

...