Ingleside Retiree Corey Weinstein Finds Joy In Music

Inglesider Corey Weinstein keeps busy in retirement. 

The Chicago native got his start in San Francisco medicine in 1969 as an intern at San Francisco General Hospital, during labor strife and the growing anti-war movement, which Weinstein was a part.

After working at the strike support and free clinics and eventually striking himself, he began to see the toll that politics and profit-driven tendencies had on Western medicine and was soon introduced to the alternative medicine practice of homeopathy and dove headfirst into learning its methods.

“A friend of mine over at General Hospital took me to a little seminar in Berkeley about homeopathy and opened my mind and changed everything,” Weinstein said. “I gave myself four years because I knew it was a complex, deeply difficult kind of science to master, an art really.”

After decades of medical service, including forming a homeopathic clinic in the East Bay early in his career and operating his private practice out of his home in Ingleside, Weinstein made the decision to retire in 2018. He also did correctional medical consulting and human rights investigations in several high-security facilities across California.

Since retiring, his days have been filled with spending time with his wife, Pat, walking around the neighborhood and getting to know his neighbors. He hopes to be known as the neighborhood’s “guy who walks with sticks up to Brooks Park.”

In addition to his walks, he has embarked on a different kind of adventure: playing the clarinet at Ocean Ale House in the band Tandem Sidecar with guitarist and harmonicist Dave Melamed. The duo plays at the neighborhood’s restaurant and bar once a month and are occasionally joined by friends. He also plays clarinet in his synagogue’s choir.

“I play a lot of music with friends, and kind of keep busy in that way,” Weinstein said. “Between the synagogue and music and just walks and stuff like that, it's a very nice retirement so far.”

The Ingleside Light recently caught up with Weinstein.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What did a typical day as a homeopathic physician look like for you?

I would just see patients. I'd wake up early, take the phone messages off the phone, call the answering service, call as many people back as I could before nine o'clock, see patients from nine to five, usually three or four days a week, depending on the time because I had another job that I did as well. Patients came in for their illness, some cough that they just got, rheumatoid arthritis, depression or whatever. I would just apply my methods, and try to get them good care in other ways. I was a very good diagnostician. I used standard diagnosis, x-rays, labs and all that. I was a standard physician in that sense. In my heyday, I gave kids shots, immunizations and played more of a role as a family care doctor. As I aged, I cut down my on-call time. As a solo practitioner that gets hard but then some years before I stopped practicing, I just cut that down slowly and wound up treating mostly elder adults in a Medicare practice, which was very rewarding but that had to do with my availability because I had a whole other job doing correctional medical consulting and human rights investigations in high security prison units here in California.

How did your band Tandem Sidecar come to be? 

There was a neighborhood jazz band called the Jamberries, and we used to play over at Caffe D’Melanio's. Now these guys have opened up, Dan Silberman and Miles Escobedo, have opened up the Ocean Ale House and we just kind of began playing there. Then that band fell apart during the pandemic, but two of us, the guitar player and I, got together in his backyard during the pandemic. Dave Melamed and I, we'd play for just our own fun and then we said, “Well, we should share this music.” I said “Miles, could we have a slot?” and he said, “Well, take a Saturday afternoon and we’ll see how you do.” So the two of us played for a while and we played other gigs, just public things that we could do and now we have a group. We named it "Tandem" because Dave is a bicyclist, so the two of us on a bicycle. We call it "Tandem Sidecar" because we invite friends to play. At the end of the month, on Saturday, we’re playing on the 29th at the Ale House. We’ll have a bass player and a drummer, and we have a piano player in the mix, waiting in the wings. I think we’ll use him in the next gig. We invite people to come and play with us and but Dave and I are still the center of it. It's really fun, and we try to be very tight and really well-arranged and stuff.

It's a once-a-month thing, but we rehearse maybe a couple of times in between — and that means I've got to practice. It is a public performance, unlike the chamber music, which is pretty much just for our own enjoyment, just for the joy of hearing yourself, hearing the three of you play Brahms or whatever it is. For this, I try to be a little more tight, but it keeps my chops up and I get to play my favorite clarinet.

What is one piece of advice you have for health or life?

Really look beneath the very superficial nature of our circumstances in all respects in America, because there's so much flim-flam and we're so easily distracted. Humans are set up to look at the next shiny thing and just to say, “OK, I will look at those next shiny things because I can't help it and it's wonderful and dazzling and fun as hell.” But I don't want to spend all my time there. I want to take off that cover and look beneath to see what's really happening, in all respects, whether it's what's going on in housing in San Francisco or between me and my doctor.