Assistant Professor of Health Professions has found the "write" balance between alternative and Western medicine.

Taking a break during her medical residency to have her first baby, Linda White discovered something: She loved to write and teach.

And having kids—and watching them get sick—reinvigorated an old interest in herbs, White says. She had been introduced to the therapeutic properties of herbs when co-teaching a course on holistic health while getting her master’s degree in biology at Stanford in the 1970s.

So, the naturally curious (and, clearly, multi-talented) White started writing articles on natural health. For more than 15 years, while raising her children, White made a name for herself as a doctor-author. She was widely published in a variety of magazines, including “Nutrition Science News,” “Mothering,” “Runner’s World,” and “Vegetarian Times.” She contributed chapters to a book on women’s health before writing several books of her own, including "The Grandparent Book," "Kids, Herbs, & Health," and "The Herbal Drugstore." Along the way she taught creative writing to middle school students and human physiology to Metro State students, as an affiliate faculty member in the 1980s.

In 2004, having heard about Metro State’s budding program in integrative therapeutic practices (at the time an individualized degree), White joined Metro State full-time “There was so much student interest in alternative medicine,” she recalls, “it was very exciting. Students were asking for more classes, particularly in herbal medicine.” White’s Botanical Pharmacology course proved popular, though its basis in science required more science background than many students had. So she developed a second course, Herbal Medicine for Beginners, which proved an even bigger hit.

White became an assistant professor of health professions in 2006, the same year integrative therapeutic practices became an official major. Besides the two herbal medicine courses, she teaches courses in Sleep Science, Physiology of Aging, Dynamics of Health, Dynamics of Disease, Medical Terminology and Stress: Physiology, Pathophysiology and Treatment.

White says Metro State also allows her to continue to learn. She accompanied a group of students on a three-week independent study course on Chinese medicine in Xianyang, China this past summer. “It was fabulous,” says White. “We spent half our time at Shaanxi University studying Chinese medicine, and half the time in an integrative hospital,” where acupuncture and other alternative practices were used side by side with Western medical techniques.

A firm believer in utilizing the benefits of both alternative and Western medicine, White says, “I’m glad that I was trained as a traditional practitioner (of medicine),” she says. “It really informs my teaching.”

And many of the skills involved in being a doctor, White believes, translate to writing and teaching. “You have to do a lot of research for all of them,” she says.

White is still writing, currently as a regular contributor to the magazines “Mother Earth News” and “Taste for Life.” Just this fall, she developed a new course, Writing for the Health Professions. It’s hard to imagine anyone more uniquely qualified to teach it.