Dr Dean Diaries | Inside Medical School — and the Unconventional Path That Followed

Walking Into a System I Didn’t Trust

By the time I started medical school in 1974, unlike most students who had this profession in their sights for decades, being a doctor only occurred to me a few months before I was admitted. I surpassed my high school guidance counselor’s expectations for me to be an executive secretary or a nurse. I was in Honors Biology but I had applied almost on a dare after watching two younger classmates get accepted to medical school. My life tends to run on serendipity – the first person I met at the Dean of Medicine’s office was my high school guidance counsellor. I had the prerequisites; I had the marks; and the medical school had upped their allotment of female applicants from twenty out of a hundred to thirty-three. I was a shoo-in.

It was such a smooth landing, so when I walked through the doors of Dalhousie University Medical School, I expected to feel settled. Instead, I felt something closer to caution.

That alertness turned out to be useful. From the very first week, I noticed gaps between how medicine was taught and how I believed it should work. Rather than stay quiet about it, I spoke up. But even more than speaking up, I acted. I now call that instinct “See Something – Do Something.” Looking back, that instinct shaped almost everything that happened next, both in the classroom and long after it.

Nothing about those early weeks felt small at the time. Every lecture carried weight. So did every conversation and every offhand comment from a professor, because I knew exactly what kind of doctor I wanted to become.

This chapter of my career explains more about my later choices than almost anything else, including why I never quite trusted medicine practiced without unbiased curiosity attached to it.

A Rocky Start to First Year

Medical school did not start quietly for me. During the first week, our orientation lecturer showed slide after slide of nude females. No one on staff seemed to notice the problem. Not knowing anyone in my class, I felt it was up to me to protest. Nude male slides were popped into that lecturer’s next presentation two days later. As a result, overnight, the school pulled every nude image from its teaching slides, labs, and study halls for good.

That single act set the tone for my next few years… See Something – Do Something. I learned fast that staying true to my values got results, even inside a rigid system. From then on, I stopped waiting for permission before I acted on my concerns, and that habit followed me straight into family practice years later.

Soon after, another student and I noticed something missing from our courses: medical ethics. So we founded an Ethics Club, and by the next year (it took them that long) the school added a full ethics course to the curriculum. But there was also time for lighter moments. In second year, I secretly organized the first annual snowball fight against the first-years. A few of us stood at the back of the slanted lecture theater and mercilessly pummeled the unsuspecting students. They could not defend themselves! This practice was still in full force many years later when my younger sister’s medical school class got attacked during the first snowfall of the year. She wasn’t too shocked to learn that I had started that tradition.

I poured that same energy into writing, too. In second year, at  Christmas, when no one was on campus, I wrote a piece called “Hand Signals for the Blind” for the medical school’s newspaper. It was really an essay on diet and lifestyle habits, wrapped in a tongue-in-cheek title. Looking back, it hinted at almost everything I would spend my career practicing and writing about, decades before I published my first book. Fortunately, nobody read it, or I may have been expelled considering how strict medical training was and still is.

Yogurt, Acupuncture, and a Classroom Debate

Again in second year, when it came time to pick an elective, I chose acupuncture over the usual options. My classmates were puzzled watching me repeatedly puncture the skin of an apple to develop the correct needling technique. But seeking out a doctor to teach me acupuncture felt obvious to me even then. It was 1976, and a few years earlier President Nixon had visited China, and all things Chinese became headline news – including acupuncture.

Around that same time, I began bringing homemade yogurt to class and I was surprised at the ribbing I took for this healthy habit. I guess the Dean of Students got wind of the controversy and asked me for my recipe before one of his lectures, in front of the whole class. The ribbing stopped.

I never saw acupuncture and nutrition as side interests. Instead, they felt like what was missing from my training, the part no one else seemed willing to teach. So, I sought it out on my own time, alongside the required coursework, and I treated it with the same seriousness as anatomy or pharmacology. The Chinese anesthesiologist who taught me said that he would help patch up sick people during the day but actually heal people in his evening acupuncture clinic. That remark really hit home and I’ve thought of it often.

During one class discussion, a debate broke out over breast milk versus baby formula. I argued firmly for breast milk, based on what I had been reading outside my course work. Even then I was amazed that the Pediatrician, who called me “Bubbles,” was convinced, with no real evidence, that bottle formula was every bit as good as breast milk.

A Private Word About Bedside Manner

Not every lesson happened in a lecture hall. During one hospital clinical rotation, I watched an orthopedic surgeon treat patients in a way that struck me as needlessly cold. Rather than let it slide, I pulled him aside afterward and shared my concerns directly, one-on-one.

I never named him publicly, then or now, but, as is common in a tight-knit community, word got around. I really wasn’t out to embarrass the doctor, the goal was simple: bedside manner matters as much as clinical skill, and someone needed to say so out loud.

Clerkship, McMaster-Style

For my clinical fourth year in medicine, I lobbied for a transfer to McMaster University. This university had rolled out a new Tutorial System that began three years prior. When I asked for a transfer, the McMaster administration thought it would be interesting to see if a student from another medical school, with a strict standard teaching program, could fit into their system of self-directed learning. Our fourth year is strictly clinical, spent in hospitals and occasionally in clinics. It’s hands-on learning “See One-Do One-Teach One.”

I was all in and had a great experience – mainly because all the other McMaster students who hadn’t properly directed their studies, were hitting the books full time to be able to pass the end of the year National Medical Board Exams. I don’t know how they got out of their clinical rotations but I found myself one of the only students on the floors, and I was often called upon to do procedures usually left to interns and residents. That experience set me up perfectly for my Internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

An Apprenticeship at UCLA’s Pain Control Clinic

One of the most formative stretches of my training happened far from Canada, at UCLA’s Pain Control Clinic (the first of its kind in the USA). For two whole months, I apprenticed there under Dr. David Bresler, where care uniquely blended acupuncture, hypnosis, diet, meditation, and counseling alongside conventional medicine. There, I saw firsthand how different approaches could work together instead of competing against one another.

One memory from that clinic still stands out clearly. Among my patients was Aldous Huxley’s widow, and our sessions together reinforced that healing rarely comes from one method alone. Overall, the clinic’s whole-person approach mirrored the philosophy I had already been building, piece by piece, since orientation week of my first year in medical school.

That apprenticeship also gave me a language for what I had been doing instinctively all along. Instead of choosing between conventional medicine and complementary care, I could simply use both, depending on what a patient actually needed. It sounds obvious now. At the time, almost no one talked about medical practice that way, especially not inside a major academic hospital.

Years later, when integrative medicine became a recognized field with its own conferences and journals, I felt a quiet sense of recognition rather than surprise. I was the first female doctor (but more importantly, a known Integrative Medicine practitioner) to be on the cover of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons journal.

I had already seen Integrative Medicine work, patient by patient, at the UCLA Clinic none of my classmates had never even heard of.

Internship, the ER, and a Mentor Who Doubted Diet

After my year at McMaster I went to Toronto for my internship at Mount Sinai Hospital. My first rotation was in the Emergency Room – definitely trial by fire, which I passed with flying colors. Like the time a soccer player sent a letter to the CEO of the hospital complimenting my excellent bedside manner. It was definitely tongue-in-cheek because I had to jump up on a chair to argue with him the importance of staying off his bruised and battered leg.

My clinical supervisor was a gastroenterologist who dismissed the idea that diet mattered at all in digestive disorders. He actually said this to me as he ate a bag of chips and drank a soda. I did not even bother disagreeing.

His lack of awareness about diet made me realize the incredible bias of allopathic medicine. It pushed me to prove my thinking through my own patients in my own practice. Arguing with him directly was never going to change his mind, so I let my future patients make the case instead. Looking back, that mentor gave me something valuable without meaning to: a clear target to aim past.

The ER rotation itself taught me something different but related. Under real pressure, with real patients, there was no time for theory. Consequently, I learned to trust fast, practical judgment, a skill that served me well once I opened my own practice the very next year.

My overnight shifts also taught me humility in a way lecture halls never could. Textbooks can’t accurately describe a patient in front of you at three in the morning. So instead of forcing every case into a familiar pattern, I learned to watch closely and adjust as I treated the whole human situation along with the physical body.

Choosing Practice Over Residency

That internship confirmed something I had known since before medical school began. I went into medicine with knowledge of nutrition, lifestyle, and the importance of emotional balance; my training did not take that away. I was not built for a conventional path. So, when it came time to choose between residency and private practice, I made an unconventional call.

Out of a class of one hundred interns, I was the only one who went straight into practice instead of pursuing further training in family practice or a specialty residency. Practicing doctors told me that it was too risky (they said there was no room for another family practitioner in Toronto and I’d have to move a few hundred miles away!), but I was just excited to begin the rest of my life.

The day after I received my Medical License, I was seeing patients and I never looked back. I did have an ace-in-the-hole, however. I’d been attending classes in Naturopathic Medicine with a group of Chiropractors who were eager to refer their patients to an open-minded doctor.

Skipping residency also meant skipping a familiar kind of safety net. No senior physician would be reviewing every decision I made, and no rotation schedule would tell me what to study next. Instead, I would have to build my own judgment in real time, with real patients, starting immediately. I felt that with my many years of studying nutrition as a hobby; my naturopathic training; and knowing that allopathic medicine did not have all the answers, gave me the knowledge I needed to succeed.

Within 6 months, I had to close my practice to new patients – an unheard-of milestone. Luckily, I had decided to do a four-day work-week leaving one day a week for study and to spend time in naturopathic clinics. It proved to be the perfect way to approach a highly stressful job – because within a few years the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic began. CFS mostly affected women who were greatly overworked with a job and a family; had depleted immune systems; poor diets; and lack of proper nutrients. I was able to easily diagnose CFS because I was outside of that “bubble” of poor health.

What The Eighties Set in Motion

Looking back, stumbling into medical school, my protests, and my unconventional UCLA elective built the same instinct: treating the whole person is the goal, not just making a diagnosis and giving a prescription. First, it showed up as a willingness to question authority. Later, it became the foundation of everything I would go on to teach and write.

None of it felt planned while it was happening. I was simply a young doctor-in-training who kept noticing gaps and refusing to look away from them.

In my next blog, I’ll share what happened when that instinct met twelve years of real patients in a busy Toronto practice. A stack of free handouts I wrote for my patients would soon become my very first book, When You Can’t Reach The Doctor (1991), almost by accident.

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.

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