Dr Dean Diaries #1 | Long Before Maui, There Was a Sugar-Filled House

This is how it began

My diaries don’t start where most people expect them to. They don’t start with The Magnesium Miracle, or the Maui ReSet Study, or any of the fifty-some books I’ve written. If you’re looking for the real Dr. Carolyn Dean biography, you need to come with me to a small house in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. To the 1950s. There’s a chest freezer in the basement. I’m stirring a pint of ice cream into a can of syrupy peaches. And I have absolutely no idea what could go wrong. Let’s begin with…

The Family

Medicine was in my family long before I got anywhere near a stethoscope. My mother was a nurse, as well as my grandmother on my father’s side, who was a nurse and a homeopath. You may think that’s surprising but homeopathy was actually much more accepted in the late 1800s in Boston, until it was drummed out of existence by “scientific medicine” in the 1920s. My father was even registered at Harvard Medical School to fulfill his dream of being a doctor. He never went. His father — my grandfather — was a photoengraver and an inventor. He built a wireless radio around the same time as Marconi. Although years of working with lead and mercury had quietly poisoned him. The family’s response was to move to Newfoundland and a welcoming extended family. Fresh air. Hard work.  Sweat. Yes, the thinking was that he could, as people used to say, sweat out the toxins. Harvard waited. Eventually, Harvard was buried entirely, until I came home with shocking news. My father never spoke of it. Not once — until I walked in and told him I had been accepted into medical school. He sat down, went quiet for a moment, and then told me everything. The registration. His father’s illness. A move north.  Years of silence. I remember thinking: all that, and I had to stumble onto medicine myself. Actually that was a gift, and it was meant to be. My parents’ story began in Scotland during the war. My father was stationed there. My mother was the Scottish nurse he fell in love with. She came back with him to Newfoundland as a War Bride — already pregnant with my older sister and exhausted from the ocean crossing. Then she learned that the final leg of the journey to Springdale would be made by Dog Sled She was beautiful, and refined, and educated and she was absolutely horrified. Then, when she became pregnant with me two years later, she made my father promise her that when her second child was walking, we would leave Newfoundland. She had me walking at eight months and we moved to Halifax and then Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and I guess I’ve never stopped. Our home became the neighborhood health resource center before that phrase even existed. People came to my mother constantly — for advice, for reassurance, for someone who would actually listen. I watched that happen from the time I was small, and something about it settled into me: the belief that people deserve someone who will listen, and someone who knows.

The Sugar House

Here is the part that still makes me shake my head. In fact, the house I grew up in where a nurse, my mother, raised her children — ran it almost entirely on sugar. In that day and age, was sugar a sign of prosperity? Every night while I was studying, I went down to the basement, opened the chest freezer, and pulled out a pint of ice cream. I’d stir it into a can of syrupy peaches or pears. That was my study fuel all through high school. To me, it was a reward for my hard work. Neither my mother nor I had any idea I was quietly dismantling my own immune system. Dinner ended with dessert — Jell-O, homemade cakes, pies, and ice cream. Our everyday drink was Kool-Aid, which is essentially dyed sugar water. I remember stirring red food dye into white margarine to make it look like butter. As if we were fooling anyone. I made French fries in Crisco every afternoon after school. For many years I assumed that it was a safe animal fat. It is not. It is a processed vegetable shortening that everyone is currently railing against. It sits squarely on every natural health practitioner’s prohibited list, including mine. When I was sick, Mum gave me ginger ale. After my tonsillectomy, I was told I could have all the ice cream I wanted. That was the one upside to the pain of surgery. But I guess I needed more sugar, so I signed up for a paper route and spent the money on Hershey’s Cherry Blossoms – a syrupy maraschino cherry encased in milk chocolate with bits of coconut and peanut. I guess I  survived because my metabolism was high. I was active. I never gained weight, and the sugar never gave me acne. From the outside, I looked perfectly fine. I was not even close to being fine.

The Cost

Let me tell you what the sugar was actually producing. First, chronic earaches that never fully went away and could have contributed to my hearing loss from a so-called genetic condition called otosclerosis. It’s actually calcification of the small bones in the ear that conduct sound (hammer, anvil, stirrup, and stapes). Calcification can come from a lack of magnesium, which I’ll talk about in great detail in future blogs. Then sore throats, over and over again.  Next, colds that cycled back like unwanted houseguests. I vividly remember my mother’s hand gently soothing my sore and swollen tummy. Then, herpes simplex cold sores felt relentless.  Finally, my tonsils came out — and then, when removing them changed nothing about how often I got sick, the antibiotics began, round after round.  Overall, I tell people now, only half-jokingly, that I was a walking yeast factory. High-functioning, yes. But a yeast factory, nonetheless. My next problem was plantar warts spreading across the heels of my feet. My family doctor’s response was pretty drastic – a series of smallpox vaccinations. I have a smallpox scar at the top of my upper arm to prove it. Of course, they did not help. What they did, I believe now, was add yet another burden to an immune system already stretched thin. Consequently, the whole time, nobody connected any of it. Not one doctor looked at the full picture and said: this girl’s gut and immune system are under siege. Each symptom was treated in isolation. The earaches here, the warts there, and the infections somewhere else. As if the body was a collection of separate parts with nothing to do with each other. I now say that medicine treats the body like a bag of chemicals with replaceable parts. Although I was not unhealthy because I was mysteriously prone to illness, I was unhealthy because of what I was eating every single day. The downstream consequences were written all over me.  Although nobody told me. In fairness, most of them probably didn’t know. I know all this now but even to this day, most people do not understand that what we eat can have such dire consequences.

Where the Dr. Carolyn Dean Biography Actually Begins

So, there it is: my family of healers, who filled the house with sugar and wondered why their daughter was always getting sick. This is not where I became a doctor. It is not where I wrote a book, or developed a protocol, or designed a study. But it is where the work began — in the accumulation of health problems that eventually demanded an explanation and a solution that I could pass on to others. Ten, over sixty years later, the Maui ReSet Pilot Study would give me the data I had been looking for my whole career. Next week in the Dr. Dean Diaries: the year I left home — and the 1971 meeting in Huntington Park, California, that produced the formula behind our revolutionary RnA ReSet Drops.

Next week in the Dr. Dean Diaries: the year I left home — and the 1971 meeting in Huntington Park, California, that produced the formula behind our revolutionary RnA ReSet Drops.

This content is for educational purposes only and discusses nutritional and lifestyle support for normal structure and function of the body. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure disease. Consult a qualified healthcare professional for personal medical guidance.

👉 More About The Maui Reset Pilot Study

👉 Learn more and become a member here: https://drcarolyndean.com/wellness-courses/