As a long-time practitioner of alternative medicine, I am often asked why I took the "road less traveled" in medicine. I certainly didn't set out to be unconventional. I graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966, earned my medical degree at Emory University Medical School in Atlanta in 1970, and completed my internship at Grady Memorial Hospital, also in Atlanta. Good formal medical education is important, and I'm grateful for this foundation in basic medicine. However, there was something ahead that was far more important to my career as a physician.
Sparkling Eyes Got Me Started
It took place one evening when I was working in the emergency room during my orthopedic surgery residency at the University of California in San Francisco. A young woman came in with a sprained ankle. As I tended to her injury, I was struck by how healthy she was—so healthy, in fact, that her eyes actually sparkled. It suddenly dawned on me that physicians never study health, and certainly never advise their patients how to achieve it.
I found out that this woman sold vitamins and took them herself and, as a result of this encounter, I began taking vitamins myself. I also started learning all I could about nutrition and natural therapies, things I was never taught in medical school. I soon became convinced that these approaches, which drew upon the body's own healing powers, held far more potential for preventing disease and restoring health than traditional medicine's blunt tools of prescription drugs and surgery.
Continuing My Education
In 1974, I met with four other doctors in the modest conference room of a Motel 6 to form the California Orthomolecular Medical Society. To my surprise and delight, one of my medical heroes, two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, PhD, showed up to lend support to our fledgling organization.
Dr. Pauling himself had coined the term orthomolecular medicine in 1968, which he defined as "the preservation of good health and the treatment of disease by varying the concentrations in the human body of substances that are normally present in the body and are required for health." More than any other label—alternative, nutritional, natural, holistic, or complementary medicine—orthomolecular medicine comes closest to describing what I have believed in and practiced for the last 30-plus years.
Patients Actually Got Well!
In 1976, I went to work at the Pritikin Longevity Center under the direction of Nathan Pritikin. Until then, in spite of my years of training in medical school, internship, and residency, I couldn't recall ever having seen patients get well. True, many got better, but virtually all stayed on "follow-up" prescription medications.
Now, for the first time in my medical career, I saw patients get well, not as a result of dangerous drugs or risky surgical procedures, but through the powerful effects of diet and exercise. And not only did these patients drop their medications, they dropped their diseases.
While my training with Pritikin convinced me of the therapeutic power of diet and exercise, I believed there was more that could be done to reverse disease and achieve optimal health. I continued my education in earnest, with the goal of identifying safe and effective solutions to some of the most common health problems of modern life: heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, and more.
I Opened the Whitaker Wellness Institute
In 1979, I opened the Whitaker Wellness Institute with the goal of helping people who had been failed by conventional medicine and had nowhere else to turn. At the clinic, patients learned the nuts and bolts of lifestyle changes. They were prescribed an intensive program of targeted nutritional supplements. And they were treated with powerful noninvasive therapies not offered by conventional physicians.
Today, the Whitaker Wellness Institute follows that same model. We are now the largest, most comprehensive integrative medical clinic in the United States. More than 40,000 patients have come through our doors, and time after time, they've proven the medical establishment wrong by improving and in many cases reversing "incurable" diseases and achieving newfound health and vitality.
My mission remains the same today as it was all those years ago: to help patients restore their health with safe, proven, natural therapies that allow them to get off prescription drugs and avoid surgery. Check us out and find out what we can do for you.
Here's to your health!