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I was born in Berkeley, California to a first generation American Chinese mother and multi-generation American Irish-Swedish father. I grew up in very sunny, hot, and humid, Houston, Texas. After a challenging education at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, I attended Texas A&M University. I was accepted to The University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston Texas after three years of undergraduate study. Summers in Houston were spent in research programs at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
My first adult experience of cold and dark weather was a combined adult and pediatric residency program at the State University of New York in Buffalo. As a third year resident I contracted viral meningitis and was hospitalized for a week in the late spring. Looking back I think perhaps this may have been vitamin D deficiency related. I recovered from this to become chief resident in internal medicine at Erie County Medical Center in my final year in Buffalo.
I was determined to return to the sunny south after four years in Buffalo. I accepted a fellowship in combined adult and pediatric rheumatology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. There I received a Physician Scientist Development Award from the American College of Rheumatology to do research on superantigens. Bench research however did not satisfy me as much as patient care.
As love would have it I followed a woman to Michigan and began my private practice. It was in Michigan that I stumbled over several patients with severe vitamin D deficiency and began linking their symptoms to my own. Fatigue, joint pain, muscle cramps, poor sleep, neck pain, and weight gain all developed about three to five years after I had moved from Texas to Michigan. Perhaps 80 percent of my patients reported these same symptoms. Could vitamin D deficiency be that common? What other symptoms or diseases was it linked to?
I furiously read the scientific literature on vitamin D, diet, and exercise. I began to understand how vitamin D, our diet, exercise, and other lifestyle choices affected biochemistry, physiology, development of disease, and even expression of our genome, which fascinated me beyond anything I had learned in previous medical training.
The Vitamin D Cure is the practical manifestation of my newly discovered passion for medicine. It looks at our health through the lens of vitamin D deficiency. It answers basic questions about how and why we became deficient. What symptoms and diseases is it tied to? And, most importantly what choices we can make to change the course of our health. The stories in the book are actual patients from my busy practice.
Your story is just as powerful, and your can offer it through a review here on Amazon or share it with us at www.thevitamindcure.com where you will also find a monthly blog with updated news, recipes, and other success stories. I hope The Vitamin D Cure changes your life as much as it has changed mine.
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