Content area
Full text
Christiane Northrup, MD, is a board-certified obstetrician/gynecologist who helps empower women to tune in to their inner wisdom and take charge of their health. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (Bantam, revised 2006) editor of the bi-monthly The Dr Christiane Northrup Newsletter; and the host of six successful public television specials. Her New York Times #1 bestseller, The Wisdom of Menopause, was revised in 2006. Her work has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, The View, and Good Morning America. Most recently, you could see Dr Northrup on her PBS television special, Menopause and Beyond: New Wisdom for Women. She lives in Maine.
Alternative Therapies (AT): What led you to enter the field of medicine? When did you know that you had to be a doctor?
Dr Northrup: It wasn't until after college and somewhere in the middle of medical school that I knew I had to be a doctor. I grew up around a lot of doctors. My aunt and uncle were both medical doctors, and my dad was a dentist, and he was very holistically oriented. Our immediate family was into whole and organic foods and other natural lifestyle elements. And the doctors in the family, my aunt and uncle, thought we were health nuts. My aunt even sent me the book The Nuts Among the Berries [An Expose of American Food Fads; Ballantine Books, 1967] when I went to medical school.
I went to medical school after being a biology major because as I went around interviewing to become a biology teacher, it was very clear that at that time-in the early '70s-every graduate program in biology was interested only in PhD research candidates, not teachers. I really wanted to teach biology. I called my advisor back at college and he said, "Oh, Chris, that's like a thoroughbred running a junk horse race. Why don't you go to medical school?" I thought, "Well, all right." I had taken a year off after college, I was very burnt out from it, and so I thought, "Well, this is a better degree. An MD will give me a lot more leeway in terms of career...