A circuitous route, not a direct one.

I'd like to give a long, personal-healthy-journey story about how I came to naturopathic medicine, but I can't. Well, I can, but it's a circuitous route, not a direct one.

When I was in Jr. High I contracted what came to be diagnosed as "autoimmune inner ear disease." I was the 26th person in the world to get that diagnosis at that time. Not the kind of thing you put on a resume, but unusual. As a result I ended up deaf in my right ear and with my sense of equilibrium wrecked. I also had a weird visual condition as a result, called oscillopsia, a ten-dollar name that means my visual field moves whenever my body moves, even in the slightest. All that stuff is still, almost 50 years later, part of my moment-to-moment existence.

As a result of it all I ended up spending a whole lot of time in the hospital when I was in Jr. High, went through two surgeries, spent far too long on antibiotics and, eventually, very high-dose prednisone. I had to rethink what path I would take through life since my lack of balance meant anything involving physical stability (e.g. sports, which were my passion prior to all this) or adequate hearing (any environment with much background noise) were not options for me.

My experience in the hospital was all kinds of miserable, so I decided I would go be a doctor so I could be a different kind of doctor than the many I encountered during my stay. I had always done OK academically and thoroughly enjoyed learning so felt comfortable with the prospect of the schooling involved in a medical degree.

That intention held throughout high school and into my first year at Notre Dame. There I decided I wasn't cut out for the hours of rote memorization required for the pre-med curriculum so I switched to a liberal arts degree and never looked back. I finished Notre Dame with a BA in English, then after a few years living in Chicago (and a few semesters at DePaul while I was there) I started an MA program in Humanities at Arizona State University (ASU).

It was while in Chicago, managing a book store with lots of books on fringe topics, that I started reading about the politics of both AIDS and cancer. By that I mean the social, political, and economic factors that were driving both of those medical monsters. Suffice it to say that AIDS is not just about a retrovirus, and cancer is not just about genetic mutations.

Once at ASU I dove into a Master's thesis on the political "construction" of AIDS. Long story. You can read it if you can find it in the ASU catalogue. The punch line is that, in researching AIDS, I uncovered a large community of people diagnosed with HIV who were preserving their health using purely natural therapies. The more I researched these therapies the clearer it became to me that our conventional medical system is not interested in restoring health.

A professor at ASU asked if I had heard of naturopathic medicine. I hadn't. I looked into it and it seemed like the perfect application of the knowledge I had accumulated about medicine and natural therapies and all of that. Besides, the Doors of Opportunity don't exactly fly open when you graduate with a Master's in Humanities. I completed all the necessary prerequisites for medical school while doing my Master's program so that by the time I finished in December 1994 I was ready to apply to naturopathic medical school.

I was accepted at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine (NCNM, not NUNM), completed the naturopathic doctor (ND) degree concurrent with a Master of Science in Oriental Medicine (MSOM), graduated in 2001, opened a big clinic in Portland, and had over two excellent decades in practice there.

After almost 30 years in Portland, Oregon, the city became something I wasn't down with. It was time to leave. I closed the Portland clinic and moved my practice and my life to Rhode Island. I still maintain an active Oregon license and am delighted to maintain a solid patient base on the West Coast via telehealth. I have also started a few days weekly in-office in Westerly, RI, at Pure EcoSpa & Boutique.