Dr. Houman Farzin is a physician focusing on the applied sciences of psychedelic-assisted therapies, nutrition, and lifestyle modification for trauma, existential distress, and overall well-being. His practice deals with combining emerging treatments and digital health technologies with mindfulness, music, and psychedelic medicine to improve quality of life, promote healing, and alleviate human suffering at all stages of life. He is an attending physician in the Division of Palliative Care of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is a lecturer at McGill University Medical School, where he earned his medical degree and completed his residency training in Family Medicine. His involvement with McGill Programs in Whole Person Care includes teaching resilience and Mindful Medical Practice to medical students. Dr. Farzin is passionate about indigenous peoples and culture and has spent several years working in rural and remote communities across Canada up to the Arctic Circle. His interest in altered states of consciousness is rooted in Eastern philosophies, as well as the anthropological study of indigenous and other ancient practices around the world. His academic education in psychedelics began while he was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He is trained in various psychedelic therapeutic modalities including MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine. He is a member of the training and ethics committees for TheraPsil, a non-profit organization dedicated to obtaining legal access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. He has organized Quebec’s first psilocybin therapy training programs and has treated the first series of patients with psilocybin and MDMA approved by Health Canada through the public healthcare system in Quebec.

Dr. Farzin is a researcher with current funding to study societal views on psilocybin therapy for existential distress and the use of cannabis and exercise to treat chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, as well as relevant inflammatory, microbiome, and metabolomic changes in this process. He was the Montreal site physician for MAPPUSX, a multi-site open-label extension study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Dr. Farzin is a co-founder of injoy (formerly Phyla); a digital health tool that uses artificial intelligence to help people understand how their diet, lifestyle, digestive symptoms, and microbiome are all connected. He is a Panel Physician for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and has an interest in serving these populations. He holds an M.Sc. from The Institute of Human Nutrition (IHN) of Columbia University and a B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley. In his spare time, he creates music and other art and performs as a DJ.