Dr Dean Diaries #4 | Twelve Years of Patients — and the Notes that became a Book

You already know I hung out my shingle within days of getting my license, and that within six months I had to close my practice to new patients. The running joke was that in order to get into Dr. Dean’s practice, you had to marry one of her patients.

What I haven’t told you yet is what twelve years of that practice actually looked like from the inside — because a lot happened between the day I opened my doors and the day, twelve years later, that a stack of handouts turned into a book with my name on it.

Growing a Practice — and Uncovering a Mystery Illness

Let’s pick up where I left off. I was doing a four-day week so I could keep studying naturopathy on my day off. All those chiropractors in my naturopathic classes, who kept sending me patients, were my secret weapon – it helped me grow my practice faster than anyone could remember.

By the early 1980s I was seeing something that never turned up in my training and it didn’t even have a name in medical texts. It occurred mostly in women who had traveled widely and had taken a lot of shots. They were exhausted, inflamed, in pain, unable to sleep, and moving through their days in a fog so thick they had no words to describe it.

I started sending their blood work to an immunologist I was working with, and what came back stopped us cold: low T-cell counts. The kind of numbers you’d expect to see in an AIDS patient, not in the exhausted, overworked women who kept filling my waiting room. It would be years before the CDC put an official name to what I was looking at. “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” wasn’t coined until 1988 — but I was already deep in it.

Over time I noticed the same two things showing up in these patients: yeast overgrowth, and nerve and muscle symptoms that I didn’t realize until many years later were magnesium deficiencies. Due to chronic stress, I finally became the poster child for that condition when I was doing AIDS research in Manhattan in the early 1990s.

Advocating for My Patients in the Operating Room

I was always tuned into my patients and tried to alleviate their suffering anyway I could. If one of my patients needed surgery, I’d arrange to have it done on my day off when I could scrub in. Not to operate. To advocate. More than once I stood there while a surgeon looked at an ovary and said, “Oh, she doesn’t need this anymore, I’ll just snip it out.” It obviously meant a lot less work for them. And I would pipe up and ask, “How difficult would it be to save this ovary–can you show me?” Apparently, in a surgical suite, organs are often treated as disposable. I never understood that, and I never stopped showing up on my day off to make my case, one surgery at a time.

The Yeast Connection

Yeast, as it turned out, deserved every bit of the attention I was giving it. Candida albicans lives in all of us, quietly, until antibiotics, sugar, and stress force it to overgrow — and once it does, it produces something like 78 different toxins. Alcohol is one of them, which is why a person suffering severe yeast overgrowth can genuinely seem drunk.

Toxins like acetaldehyde damage the liver. Zymosan drives inflammation and psoriasis. Arabinitol attacks the brain and the nervous system. And on top of all of that, yeast manufactures hormone-mimicking chemicals that can wreck a woman’s hormonal balance causing hypothyroidism, PMS, perimenopause, and early menopause.

I was seeing the fallout of yeast overgrowth in my office nearly every day. So, when The Candida Foundation of Canada set up shop on the third floor of my own office building, I started giving monthly public lectures there. Word travels when you’re one of the only people talking plainly about something everybody’s quietly suffering from, and it eventually landed me on TV Ontario – on a show called Speaking Out – hosted by Harry Brown.

On November 20, 1986, I sat next to Dr. William Crook — the man who wrote The Yeast Connection — for ninety minutes while the phones lit up. Due to a heavy snowstorm with thousands housebound, eighty thousand calls came in during that broadcast. Eighty thousand! That’s when I understood, really understood, how many people were living with something nobody had ever explained to them.

The Device

But if you want the story from those many years ago that still makes people’s eyebrows go up, it isn’t the yeast, and it isn’t the surgeries. It’s the Star Trek device.

One of my Toronto patients was the adult son of the Canadian Ambassador to Iran. He had chronic fatigue, and his father asked me, quite directly, if I would learn a new modality to treat him. It was called MIHR — Magnetically Influenced Homeopathic Remedies — and I mean it when I say it was inspired by Star Trek. When I finally reached Manhattan I learned to make the Remedies. I distilled Chinese herbs, then potentized them homeopathically, sterilized them through micropore filters, and then stored them in sterile vials. To administer one of the many remedies, I used a handheld magnetic activator while injecting into acupuncture points on the lower arms and lower legs. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. The results were, honestly, quite miraculous.

The Ambassador had learned about the treatment through the Shah of Iran, whose sister was being treated with it at her penthouse in Manhattan. The inventor’s wife and his assistant flew to Toronto from Manhattan to train me and left me with supplies. Here I was practicing family medicine in Toronto, and somewhere in the middle of an ordinary week I was being personally trained in a device that belonged in the twenty-second century. Then I practiced the technique on a group of AIDS patients. One of them told me a story about his Immunologist who was criticizing me for ripping off AIDS patients. My patient calmly asked: “How is that possible when she isn’t even charging me?”

Learning the MIHR technology was important then, but it became more important as I moved along in my career and began a study on AIDS and Chronic Fatigue patients in New York. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Blood Sugar, Sugar Holidays, and a Fight with the Licensing Board

Underneath all of it — the yeast, the Chronic Fatigue — there was something quieter happening that mattered just as much. Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) was rampant in my practice. Anxiety, depression, irritability, fatigue, skin rashes, headaches, and intestinal upset – I’d see the whole cluster in one patient and know, before I even ran the numbers, that low blood sugar was probably driving most of it. Ironically it was usually caused by a diet high in sugar and simple carbs. You eat the carb meal, your blood sugar soars, then it crashes and you crash too.

The solution, more often than not, was what I started calling a “sugar holiday.” Take the sugar out, and watch what happens. It worked, quietly and reliably, for years. It was the most rewarding when I would ask the parents of a sugar-addicted child to give them a 5 day sugar holiday but then a blow-out sugar party on day 6. I told them to make it a Saturday so they could recover on Sunday! Saturday was a lot of fun for these kids, until it was not. Hyperactivity, irritability, nausea, tummy ache, headache, and even vomiting made it a very bad day and kids learned from that experiment that they had to be wary of too much sugar.

It was our collective sugar addiction that put me on live television with a can of soda and a bowl of sugar in front of me as I spooned out the 10 tsp of sugar that was in that can. And that bit of truth-telling had my medical licensing board attacking me even though I was no longer living in Canada and no longer had a Canadian medical license.

But that story is for next week. For now, just know that long before it became a fight, telling people the dangers of sugar was simply good medicine, practiced quietly, one exhausted patient at a time.

From Patient Handouts to a Published Book

But before I go, there’s the book. This is the fun part.

I never sat down one day and decided to become an author. What actually happened is that after a few short years into my practice, I found myself explaining the same things over and over. So I started writing up FAQs — plain-language answers to the questions that kept cropping up, condition by condition that I could hand out to my patients. That was the extent of my plan. Then while I was on vacation, a wonderfully enterprising secretary took every one of those handouts, organized them, and had them bound into an actual book. We expanded it and put on a nice purple cover and called it When You Can’t Reach The Doctor. It came out in 1991, and it was the start of what turned into a real publishing career. I’ve written dozens and dozens of books since then, and I have no plans to stop.

Looking back at those twelve years now, I see how much I learned directly from my patients – listening, collaborating on their treatment, and agreeing that they were part of the healing process. It wasn’t just a vitamin or a homeopathic remedy. One patient was so tuned-in that she evem asked me to just give her a placebo for what was ailing her!

A Toolkit of Healing Techniques

Speaking of homeopathic remedies, I used another Star Trek device from the U.K. that was able to make homeopathic remedies. So, at the beginning of flu season I would “repertorize” all the distinguishing symptoms of the current flu and assign a remedy for sick patients. That was very helpful and found I really did not have to prescribe antibiotics for colds and flus.

Then there were the chiropractic maneuvers I learned from some of my chiropractor friends in my naturopathic courses. My favorite was “pulling down” hiatal hernias that insisted on getting stuck at the esophageal-diaphragmatic juncture. Then there was ear acupuncture (auricular therapy) for anxiety, weight loss, and sinus problems. I think I was at a healing conference just about every weekend adding to my repertoire.

But it really wasn’t until I helped develop the picometer-sized, stabilized mineral ions that I had something that could truly be The Great Work that I proved in the Maui ReSet Study. I didn’t need to learn any more techniques to treat symptoms. I have the basic building blocks to keep people well.

And that didn’t happen until after a Random House editor with migraines, that were “cured” with magnesium, asked me to write a book on that amazing mineral. But here I am racing ahead – like I usually do! If you remember in Blog #1, my mother had me walking by 8 months of age!

Next week: what happened, in front of a live studio audience of schoolchildren, when I poured out ten teaspoons of sugar to illustrate the amount of sweetness in a can of soda — and why it eventually cost me a license I no longer even had.

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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