​A Doctor’s Journey:

From Traditional Medicine to Integrative Healing

​

There was nothing unusual about my education, except I was accepted into medical school

after three years of college. I was one of only ten women in my medical school class, and like most classmates, approached medicine with a hope to heal, combining science and learned

knowledge, with caring and empathy for the patient being treated. I completed my medical

education at the University of Missouri Medical School in 1971, graduating with honors in psychiatry, into a rotating internship at the Medical College of South Carolina.

Subsequently, I undertook a residency in Internal Medicine at Menorah Medical Center and
received training in Pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospital, both located in Kansas City, MO. In 1974, I achieved board certification from the American Board of Internal Medicine and was
driven by my desire to offer primary care to families, even though Family Practice had not yet
been established as a recognized specialty at that time.

As I began my practice, patients were also telling me of treatments that had healed them, that I had never heard of in medical school: radionics for rapid healing of bone fracture, nutrition healing rheumatic fever, faith healing. Patients were my first teachers after medical school. That was 50 years ago. As I was becoming keenly aware of other types of medicine I met neurosurgeon Norm Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., who convened a meeting to found the American
Holistic Medical Association in 1978. I was a founding member. Never had I been in medical
education meetings in which doctors were happy, hugged one another, had exercise breaks in
the presentations, and heard from speakers on faith healing and use of vitamins and minerals to help in health. Imagine that.

​

The rich sharing with holistic colleagues further expanded my education after medical
school, and led me to learn of homeopathy, detoxification, Jeffrey Bland’s work in what
became functional medicine, and ultimately, Rudolf Steiner’s system of anthroposophic
medicine.

​

Anthroposophic medicine was a lens through which I could consider all approaches to
healing. For the first time in medical circles, I heard the question ‘What is the human
being?’ being considered and discussed. Furthermore, the approach of the doctor should be
reverence toward the patient. This re-ignited my original hope to offer true healing, which
had been buried in books and labs. I immersed myself in learning anthroposophic
medicine, and was richly rewarded deep in my soul with hearing humane and wise
statements about the human being, and a new intellectual grasp of biology and reality
based on observation, and showing its underlying beauty.

I continued to learn other aspects of complementary medicine, such as Donnie Yance’s work in botanical oncology, and Morley Robbins’ Root Cause Protocol. These two ‘non-doctors’ have each plumbed the scientific literature in a profoundly capable way that medical doctors have yet to add to their understanding. Donnie Yance explores the scientific literature on herbs in relation to cancer and cancer treatments. Morley Robbins scours the literature on minerals, highlighting iron, copper, and magnesium, in their impact on energy production, to explain the chronic inflammation plaguing the twenty-first century.

At a certain point in my practice, I advocated for parents seeking vaccine exemptions for their at-risk school-age children. I lost my medical licenses, and that story is recounted at www.reclaimingmed.org.
 

Physician and patient autonomy was undermined in these years (approximately 2015 onward), and is still challenged. It is not clear if allopathic medicine will provide a home for real healing, or if the values of true healing will live in interested members of the public, and alternative health professions. Given this uncertainty, I am eager to share what I have been blessed with, from both a sound classical allopathic medical training, and from anthroposophic and integrative medical training.

​