Jenny Goodman is a medical doctor, author, lecturer and broadcaster, living in London. She qualified at Leeds University Medical School in 1982, and worked as a junior doctor in General Medicine, Surgery and A&E. Disillusioned with conventional medicine’s failure to enquire about the causes of illness or to do preventive healthcare, she left. She then lectured extensively, both on medical sciences to practitioners, and on topics such as women’s health and the politics of health to the general public in adult education classes. She also did a Master’s degree in psychotherapy and counselling, and worked as a therapist at the Hammersmith Hospital, thinking her days as a medic were finally over.

However: in the 1990s she was lucky enough to discover the British Society for Ecological Medicine, a group of doctors and other practitioners who practise nutritional and environmental medicine. They were asking the same questions that had gone unanswered for her throughout medical school. And they were finding answers, helping their patients to attain dramatically better health through changes in diet and nutrition, and through detoxification.

Jenny trained with the BSEM’s post-grad course, and qualified in Ecological Medicine, learning in depth about the nutritional and environmental factors that affect our physical and mental health, and passing this information on to her patients and students. She has been practising Ecological Medicine for 22 years now, with a special interest in fertility, pre-conception care and working with children. She is continually seeing the devastating effects of pollution upon people’s health and is excited to be able to use her knowledge of biochemistry to remove these environmental toxins from their bodies, make them better, and teach them how to avoid such contamination in the future.

Jenny teaches regularly at the British Society for Ecological Medicine, and has taught at numerous other places including the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, Herbfest, the College of Naturopathic Medicine and many, many more. For 10 years she was the convener of a case-discussion group, where medical and naturopathic/nutritional practitioners share knowledge and clinical experience. She often has other doctors or naturopathic practitioners sitting in on her consultations.

Having studied the environmental history of hundreds of patients, she is now deeply committed to explaining the bigger picture – that what we are doing on our farms and elsewhere on our planet profoundly affects the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, and therefore affects the health of our bodies and minds. This could be summed up as a transition from Pharma to Farmer (Jenny does have a small allotment).

Jenny is the author of two books:

• “Staying Alive in Toxic Times: A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health”, published in Jan 2020 by the Yellow Kite imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. (Since this book’s publication she has been on numerous podcasts from around the world and is in high demand as an interviewee and a presenter of live talks and webinars.)

• “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times: An Ecological Doctor’s Prescription for Healing Your Body and the Planet”. Published in July 2024 by Chelsea Green. This book explains the role of environmental pollution in creating our current epidemics of chronic, degenerative diseases, all of which are preventable if we can clean up our act on Planet Earth.