Talk Synopsis:

We have a health crisis – rapidly rising incidences of cancer, dementia, diabetes and more. We also have an environmental crisis – dying trees, vanishing species, poisoned oceans. This talk will join the dots between these two problems and will point at their common solutions. We can’t poison the planet without poisoning the people, but it is within our power to stop doing both, to reclaim both our health and that of planet earth. What we eat, drink, inhale and put on our skin affects our bodies and minds profoundly, for good or ill. There are ways both to remove environmental toxins from our bodies and to prevent them getting into us in the first place. We need serious detox for both person and planet!

Speaker Bio:

Jenny Goodman is a medical doctor, author, lecturer and broadcaster, living in London. She qualified at Leeds University Medical School in 1982, and worked as a junior doctor in General Medicine, Surgery and A&E. Disillusioned with conventional medicine’s inability to heal sick people, and its failure to enquire about the causes of illness or to do preventive healthcare, she left. She then lectured extensively, both on medical sciences to practitioners of alternative medicine, and on topics such as women’s health and the politics of health to the general public in adult education classes. She also did a Master’s degree in psychotherapy and counselling, and worked as a therapist at the Hammersmith Hospital, thinking her days as a medic were finally over.

However: in the 1990s she was lucky enough to discover the British Society for Ecological Medicine, a group of doctors and other practitioners who practise nutritional and environmental medicine. They were asking the same questions that had gone unanswered for her throughout medical school. And they were finding answers, helping their patients to attain dramatically better health through changes in diet and nutrition, and through detoxification.

Jenny trained with the BSEM’s post-grad course, and qualified in Ecological Medicine, learning in depth about the nutritional and environmental factors that affect our physical and mental health, and passing this information on to her patients and students. She has been practising Ecological Medicine for 22 years now, with a special interest in fertility, pre-conception care and working with children. She is continually seeing the devastating effects of pollution upon people’s health and is excited to be able to use her knowledge of biochemistry to remove these environmental toxins from their bodies, make them better, and teach them how to avoid such contamination in the future.

Jenny teaches regularly at the British Society for Ecological Medicine, and has taught at numerous other places including the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, Herbfest, the College of Naturopathic Medicine and many, many more. For 10 years she was the convener of a case-discussion group, where medical and naturopathic/nutritional practitioners share knowledge and clinical experience. She often has other doctors or naturopathic practitioners sitting in on her consultations.

Having studied the environmental history of hundreds of patients, she is now deeply committed to explaining the bigger picture – that what we are doing on our farms and elsewhere on our planet profoundly affects the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, and therefore affects the health of our bodies and minds. This could be summed up as a transition from Pharma to Farmer (Jenny does have a small allotment).