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Michael Lerner, PhD, is president and founder of Commonweal, a 25-year-old health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California, with program interests in at-risk children, people with cancer, health professionals who work with life threatening illnesses, and the emerging environmental health movement (www.commonweal.org).
Dr Lerner is the co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, a week-long residential program for people with cancer that was featured in an hour long documentary in the Bill Moyers PBS series "Healing and the Mind." He is the author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer, from MIT Press. In 1983, Lerner was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation for his contributions to public health.
Dr Lerner, who serves as president of the Smith Farm Center for the Healing Arts in Washington, D.C., (www.smithfarm.org), is also a co-founder of Health Care Without Harm, an international campaign with the goal of ending the major contribution that hospitals make to dioxin and mercury exposure (www.noharm.org). In addition, he is co-founder of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE), a national partnership of organizations and individuals concerned with health and the environment (www.cheforhealth.org).
Alternative Therapies: What motivated you to pioneer ecological medicine and focus your interest on the environment's effect on our health?
Michael Lerner: In 1972, I took a year's sabbatical from teaching political science at Yale to work with the Carnegie Council on Children. I decided to look at the unusual experiment in raising children that was taking place in the small, counterculture community of Bolinas in northern California. I settled in Bolinas for a year and took a job with the Bolinas School, working in the second-- grade classroom so I could watch what was happening to the children who were growing up in counterculture families. During that year I met Carolyn Brown who had started The Growing Mind, a school in Berkeley for neurologically handicapped children. When I visited The Growing Mind, I was introduced to a little girl who had been diagnosed as retarded. When wheat and dairy products were removed from her diet, it turned out that she was not retarded. She had a learning disability, but her severe food allergies had caused the...