Pain Points with Max Shen Dr Thomas Pollak on Balinese witch doctors and therapeutic resets for chronic illness
Mar 19, 2026
Dr Thomas Pollak, a UK neuropsychiatrist studying immunopsychiatry and chronic illness, recounts a Balinese healer ritual that inspired thinking about therapeutic resets. He explores cybernetic set-point models, how intense experiences or focused awareness can shift stuck states, and why psychiatry needs dynamic models linking inflammation, perception, and recovery.
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Balinese Balian Rebirthing Experience
- Thomas Pollak recounts a traumatic visit to a Balinese Balian where blindfolded, escalating painful procedures and chanting produced an overwhelming, disorienting experience.
- The healer used sharp pressure points and violent massage, ended with singing 'happy birthday' implying a rebirthing ritual that sparked Pollak's interest in 'resets'.
Resets Open Plasticity Windows
- Pollak frames many treatments as 'reboots' or 'resets' that inject entropy to open a window of plasticity allowing systems to rebuild.
- He links this across scales from psychedelics to fecal transplants and extreme rituals as mechanisms that forcibly disrupt stuck attractor states.
Monastery Contemplation Shaped His View
- Pollak describes early Buddhist experiences including a teenage retreat where he sat with an embalmed body to contemplate impermanence, sparking lifelong meditation practice.
- He connects meditative constructionist insights to neuroscience's predictive processing view of perception as constructed.