About Ari

Ari Kriegsman, MD FASAM is a board certified Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine Physician. He attended Middlebury College, the Weill Cornell School of Medicine, and did his Internal Medicine Residency in the Social Medicine Program at Montefiore/Albert Einstein, where he also served as Chief Resident. He spent 6 years in the San Francisco Bay Area working at the Valley Homeless Healthcare Program. While there he co-founded the Backpack Medicine Program and was Medical Director of the Santa Clara County Re-Entry Medical Clinic where he focused on the health and wellbeing of people returning home from incarceration. During this time he was on faculty at the Stanford University School of Medicine where he directed the Social Medicine rotation of the Internal Medicine Residency Program. Ari has been working in Springfield, MA for the past 6 years. He created the Addiction Consult Service at Mercy Medical Center, one of the first such services in a community hospital, anywhere in the country; where his mission was to help the hospital become a truly healing place for people with substance use disorders. He currently is the Medical Director of the Carlson Recovery Center, and Medical Director of the BHN Springfield Opioid Treatment Program where his mission is to increase access to life-saving medications, and to continue to transform addiction medicine care into a truly healing experience.

My Journey Through Medicine

I took a non-traditional path to being a physician and prior to medical school I taught English internationally as a way to travel and see the world. I became deeply interested in yoga and meditation and traveled to India 3 times to study there. When I decided to go to medical school, it was with the vision of being an Integrative Medicine Physician. I imagined weaving herbs, acupuncture and yoga into a practice of Western Medicine. While I have studied and practiced acupuncture, and have taught yoga in my clinics, integration to me has been more through the lens of social medicine--seeking to bring the highest quality care to those who are least likely to receive it.

As a way to sustain my work and deal with the secondary trauma we experience, I've had a long and dedicated practice of yoga, movement and mindfulness. I completed the Conquering Lion Yoga Teacher Training in New York City in 2011, and have been practicing yoga daily for over 25 years. 

In my professional life I have extensive experience working with heavily traumatized populations. I know what trauma looks like. Working in the hospital during COVID I started to see the same signs in my colleagues. I worked to address this in several ways: teaching yoga on the floors of the hospital, facilitating mutual support groups, advocating for staff, and raising funds to build a state of the art re-charge room for hospital staff. This model has since been adopted at other affiliated hospitals throughout the country.

Having worked with traumatized patients throughout my career, I have followed the research into psychedelics very closely. I am certified by the Multi-Disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, and by the California Institute of Integral Studies in psychedelic research and therapy. I have lectured on the science and evidence of psychedelics to the Massachusetts Society of Addiction Medicine and the Massachusetts Society of Family Physicians. I am especially interested in how we can apply the psychedelic framework to healing without the use of drugs. For example, by bringing attention to our mindsets and physical settings, we can significantly impact our experiences. And that aiming to shift out of our usual modes of thinking, through the use of modalities like breathwork, yoga and time in nature, we can achieve deeper senses of peace, and new pathways to healing.