...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, but there was something to come that was far more important to my career as a physician.

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 learned that this woman sold vitamins and took them herself and, as a result of this encounter, I personally began taking vitamins. More importantly, I began learning all I could about nutrition and natural therapies, subjects virtually ignored by medical schools. 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."