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

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 — the latter being unusual for her time, and something I would only come to appreciate much later.   Additionally, my father had been registered at Harvard Medical School. 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. Fresh air. Hard work.  Indeed, the thinking was that he could, as people used to say, sweat out the toxins.

However, Harvard waited. Eventually, Harvard was forgotten entirely.

My father never spoke of it. Not once — until I walked in and told him I had been accepted to 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.

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 and exhausted from the ocean crossing. Then she learned that the final leg of the journey to Springdale would be made by Dog Sled.

In fact, she was absolutely horrified.

Then, when she became pregnant with me two years later, she made my father a promise: when Carolyn is walking, we go.

She had me walking at eight months. My mother was not a woman who made idle promises.

After, we moved to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.  Thus, I have never really stopped moving since.

Our home became the neighborhood health resource 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 — the house where a nurse and the granddaughter of a homeopath raised their children — ran almost entirely on sugar.

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. I thought I was being practical. I had no idea I was quietly dismantling my own immune system.

Dinner ended with dessert — Jell-O, cake, pie, ice cream, usually some combination of all four. Our everyday drink was Kool-Aid, which is essentially dyed sugar water and nothing more. 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, assuming for years that it was animal fat. It is not. It is a processed vegetable shortening. 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. I thought that was the one upside.

I had a paper route and spent the money on cherry blossom chocolates and pop. Besides, 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 very wrong about that.

The Cost

Let me tell you what the sugar was actually producing.

First, chronic earaches that never fully went away.  Then sore throats, over and over again.  Next, colds that cycled back like unwanted houseguests. 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.

Plantar warts spread across the soles of my feet. My family doctor’s response was a series of smallpox vaccinations — this is my own recollection, and in my recollection, 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.

Therefore, not one appointment looked at the full picture and said: this girl’s gut is under siege. Each symptom was treated in isolation. The earaches here, the warts there, the infections somewhere else. As if the body were a collection of separate parts with nothing to do with each other.

Although I was not unhealthy because I was 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 now.

Where the Dr. Carolyn Dean Biography Actually Begins

So there it is. The chest freezer in Dartmouth. A War Bride mother who had already crossed an ocean and a Dog Sled trail to get here. My family of healers, who filled the house with sugar and wondered why their daughter was always getting earaches.

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 absolutely where the work began — in the quiet accumulation of experience that eventually demands an explanation.

Then, fifty years later, the Maui ReSet Pilot Study would give me the data I had been looking for my whole career. But data only means something when you understand the question behind it. And I learned the question in a basement in Nova Scotia, with a spoon and a can of peaches.

This is the Dr. Carolyn Dean biography. And we are only just getting started.

Next week in the Dr. Dean Diaries: The year I left home — and the 1969 deathbed meeting in California that produced the formula behind RnA 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.

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