As a college undergraduate Lyn wanted to pursue a graduate degree in biochemistry at Cornell University.
Her undergraduate professor was a gentleman called Dr. Jeffrey Bland.
You might not have heard of him but he’s considered the father of functional medicine—a huge branch of medicine related to nutrition and biochemistry which uses non-harmful substances to address health conditions.
Dr. Bland took Lyn into his office and said, “You know, I just don’t think you’re going to be that happy in a laboratory with a bunch of rats.”
He said, “I have this friend who’s coming to talk at your college. His name is Dr. Joseph Pizzorno.”
Fast forward 30 years, he’s now one of the most well-read and published naturopathic physicians globally.
“He gave this pretty stunning lecture to the 20 of us that were in the room and I thought, I have to learn what this man knows.
It turns out that Dr. Bland was correct.
The next year Lyn ended up entering the second-ever class of John Bastyr College—the major university in naturopathic medicine in the United States of America.
The other part of Lyn’s personal history which is relevant is that Lyn was not always a healthy person.
Her father worked in an explosives factory where they made napalm for Vietnam and brought a lot of that material home on his work clothes.
Environmental medicine doctors are now taught that in such cases exposure is not just for the person who’s working in the factory, it’s for the whole family.
Lyn was exposed to many things as a young child.
In 2000, she had been in practice since 1985 and she took a class with a naturopathic physician named Dr. Walter Crinnion on environmental medicine, just as an introduction.
She found herself whispering to her colleague, sat next to her.
They were both saying the same thing; while many patients got better, some of them did not.
“The reason they did not respond to our therapies was because we were not looking for the cause of the problem. We didn’t know where to look. We didn’t know how to look, and we certainly didn’t know how to treat toxic exposures.”
So Lyn, with her doctor colleague rushed up to Dr. Crinnion at the end of the program and said, “You must teach us everything you know.”
They convinced him to begin a clinical training program for physicians and primary health care providers in environmental medicine.
In the training program, all the doctors as students, did fat biopsies on each other and sent them into the laboratory so that their toxic load could be assessed, and blood, and urine.
When the results came back, Dr. Crinnion took Lyn aside and said, “You know, you’re really right up there. I think you’re the second or third most toxic person in the class.”
This was no surprise to Lyn because she had had multiple illnesses including chronic fatigue syndrome and she was unable to handle low-level exposures that most people could, like a hotel room for example.
She got to work, and it took several years.
“There are no magic pills, as you know. It’s a process.”
She says, “I consider myself a recovering environmental medicine patient. By that, I mean that I do continue to avoid exposures.”
For my next interview I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Lyn Walker to talk about treating EMF sensitivity as we go under the hood of a major new EMF event:
