About Dr S Goodman

Sandra Goodman was born and grew up in Montreal, Canada, a highly cosmopolitan city in Quebec, subject to the political tensions of the Canadian French and English divide. In addition to focusing upon her academic studies in the arts and sciences, Sandra was also a talented pianist and athlete, particularly in gymnastics. Having qualified as a Red Cross swimming instructor and Royal Lifesaving Society lifeguard, she greatly enjoyed teaching young adults and children to swim and overcome their fear of the water.

Sandra graduated with her PhD in Molecular Biology from McGill University with her Thesis Expression of host genes in soybean root nodules, research attempting to identify nitrogen fixation genes in a legume, with an ultimate goal of being able to transfer such genes to non-legumes and reduce the requirement for fertilizer.

Dr Goodman worked for a Multi-National Corporation in the USA as a Biotechnology Scientist until the mid 1980s, eventually travelling and settling in the UK, where she focussed her work on health-related matters, writing and authoring several books regarding the role of Nutrition in empowering optimum health. These included the books Germanium – The Health and Life Enhancer, Vitamin C The Master Nutrient, Cancer and Nutrition: The Positive Scientific Evidence (with Dr Rosy Daniel) and Nutrition and Cancer: State-of-the-Art.

The catastrophic but flawed research paper in the Lancet in the early 1990s alleging that women with breast cancer attending the Bristol Cancer Help Centre (BCHC) were more likely to die than those undergoing conventional treatment almost led to the closure of BCHC. Having authored a scholarly article Nutritional and Lifestyle Guidelines for People with Cancer, Dr Goodman was then commissioned in the early 1990s to set up a Cancer and Nutrition database which would identify the published research papers in this field.

During the compilation of this database, drawn from some 5000 peer-reviewed research papers, it was suggested by Sandra’s long-term partner Mike Howell that there was a lack of communication of this type of research both to health professionals and the serious general reader of health information. Thus was born Positive Health magazine, which has now published over 246 issues (the print magazine ceased after Issue 150); the entire archive is exclusively online at www.positivehealth.com

Being part of an immigrant community, the feeling of always belonging to a minority group has been a strong element in forging her own identity; also in her wish to bridge the divides between disputing groups. The novel Two Solitudes by Canadian author Hugh McLennan almost appears to be replayed in the divide between Orthodox and Complementary Medicine. Dr Goodman has worked for the past 24+ years as a co-founder and Editor of Positive Health PH Online in attempting to show that there is no divide between different types of healthcare, just different approaches, i.e. Integrated Medicine.