Founder

Beth Alderman was born in Rockford, Illinois in the year 1955 to Ford Alderman of Muskegon, Michigan, and Elise Martha Wahlstrom Alderman of Trollhatten, Sweden. Her childhood was rich in explorations of upper Mississipia through walking, swimming, canoeing, rock climbing, and caving; as well as in social and psychological obstacles that continue to motivate her healing and transformation.

Beth chose to become a doctor very early in life from an express desire to help others, and from an unconscious desire to heal her father’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The decision was also motivated by a desire to emulate the doctor of the Essex Scottish Regiment with whom her father had been a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, who had enabled the imprisoned men to stay fit and sane.

After attending Wight Elementary School, Lincoln Junior High School, and Rockford East High School, she spent a year at Northwestern University and then transferred to the University of Chicago, where she earned an AB degree in Biology and an MD degree from the Pritzker School of Medicine. After a year of internship in categorical medicine at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, she entered the Preventive Medicine Residency program at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Seattle, Washington, where she obtained her MPH. Fortunately for Beth, she attended University in the time of President Johnson’s Great Society, which offered scholarships based on achievement and financial need.

On finishing her training, Beth joined the faculty department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics of the University of Colorado Medical School, where she did research in clinical and reproductive epidemiology and obtained board certification in Preventive Medicine and Public Health. Five years later, she returned to the University of Washington to join the faculty of the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine. During this time, she had the chance to collaborate with and learn from many gifted and able colleagues, including those who did similar work in other countries.

In the late 1980s, Beth began to experience insidious symptoms that led to her diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1996. During the subsequent months, while bedridden with pain and disequilibrium, she occupied herself with writing. Through this, she inadvertently began to “put it all together”. Recognizing that mainstream medicine had little to offer, Beth turned to Dr. Cao of Bastyr University, and to a string of what some would call “alternative” providers. After ten years, she found an open-minded doctor of family medicine who took an empirical approach to treating emerging illnesses. After another five years, she found Dr. Fernando Vega, the doctor she had long sought after in herself and others. Dr. Vega was a maverick with horse sense, street smarts, and a well-developed and well-used conscience. This conscience inspired him to develop an innovative group practice, which broke conventional boundaries by offering multidisciplinary, creative, sensible, objective, intuitive, and effective care.

Dr. Vega’s elimination diet allowed her to discover that conventional food had been poisoning her daily, for fifteen years. She found that corn oil and derivatives were the most damaging, and that inhaled poisons and non-ionizing radiation poisoning were likewise toxic. She realized that it was not only birds, frogs, bees, newts, and other struggling species that were succumbing to the modern human way of living, it was all evolved life, including the most clueless of species: humans.