This article is based in part on “My Personal Odyssey in Skepticism” published in Skeptical Inquirer’s Nov/Dec 2016 issue, Vol. 40 No 6, p.37-8.

I began to question the existence of God in my early teens, because of the hypocrisy I observed among my fellow Methodists and because of things I read. In looking back, it’s hard to retrace my path, but I remember being impressed by Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a book about comparative religions. It made me realize those different religions couldn’t all be right, so maybe they were all wrong; and it explained some of the psychology that might have led humans to invent gods. And I remember reading quotations from the great American atheist Robert Green Ingersoll. I had never met an atheist, and didn’t talk about my own lack of belief to anyone until many years later.

I had been brought up to believe a supernatural being was aware of my every thought and divine justice would punish me for every wrong-doing and wrong-thinking. It was such a relief to realize that wasn’t true! I was liberated. Instead of feeling fearful and guilty and praying for God to help me, I was freed to help myself, take responsibility, and find my own purpose in life.

I still believed in a lot of other improbable things, like dowsing and ESP, mainly because I had never been exposed to anything that questioned them. I remember concentrating on clouds, trying to make them move with my mind (it didn’t work). Despite my scientific grounding in college and medical school, and my general tendency to question authority, my education in critical thinking didn’t really began until my early 30s, when I subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer. That magazine changed my life in more ways than I could ever have imagined.

Reading Skeptical Inquirer was the equivalent of a college course in critical thinking. It was a revelation to discover prosaic natural explanations for what had seemed to be supernatural phenomena, and to learn about the human psychology of how our thinking can go astray.

Most people are resistant to changing their mind and admitting they were wrong, but I have always been glad to find out I was wrong about something. It means I have learned something and have a better grasp on reality than I did before. I feel smarter, and I find that very satisfying. I have changed my mind about so many things and learned so very much.

If I could go back and talk to my 20-year-old self, I would have told the young me not to be so friggin’ gullible. I would have tried to educate the young me about what constitutes credible scientific evidence and why personal anecdotes are so unreliable. I would have taught the young me to use my SkepDoc’s Rule: before you accept any claim, try to find out who disagrees with it and why. I could have saved myself from many years of believing weird things without sufficient evidence.

I read books by the intellectual giants who wrote for Skeptical Inquirer, and I attended skeptical conferences as a sort of “groupie” to hear them speak in person. Who could have guessed that in a few short years I would be up on that stage with them speaking at conferences in six countries on three continents?

My own career in skepticism really started when I attended Ray Hyman’s Skeptic’s Toolbox workshop in 2002 at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It was Ray and a physician on the Toolbox faculty, Wallace Sampson, who first encouraged me to try my hand at writing. I was amazed to discover at that late stage in my life that I could write: I had a knack for simplifying and explaining things with a humorous touch. My first ever published article appeared in Skeptical Inquirer when I was 57 years old, and one thing led to another. In 2006, Michael Shermer offered me a regular column in Skeptic magazine and let me call it “The SkepDoc.” In 2008 Steven Novella invited me to join him and three other physicians in founding the Science-Based Medicine website, where I have written a weekly article ever since. In 2013 I became co-author of the college textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions. I have become a prolific writer for all sorts of venues. I even had a brief stint as a columnist for _O, The Oprah Magazine; and Scientific American commissioned me to write a piece on homeopathy.

The best way to understand a topic is to write about it and explain it to others. Little by little, I became recognized as an expert in evaluating questionable health claims and detecting flaws in published clinical studies. Doctors and scientists often change their minds as the evidence evolves. I once thought acupuncture was effective because the early evidence seemed to support it; but as more evidence accumulated, I came to agree with Steven Novella and David Colquhoun’s assessment that it is only a theatrical placebo. My colleagues and I have written many articles showing how the supporting evidence is flawed; the best studies show it doesn’t matter where you put the needles or even if you use needles at all. In one study, touching the skin with a toothpick worked just as well.

As a young child, I remember assuming I would grow up to become a housewife and stay-at-home mom like my mother. But I soon realized I could do anything I wanted to do. Even before I became a skeptic, I defied societal expectations as a woman in three male-dominated fields: medicine, the military, and aviation. When I graduated from medical school in 1970, women were allowed to enter those fields, but they weren’t always fully accepted and were seldom welcomed. A lot of people still thought women were less capable than men. Nevertheless, I persisted; I became a board-certified physician, a flight surgeon, an instrument-rated private pilot, and a full colonel in the Air Force, retiring with that rank after 20 years’ service. I faced not only subtle but overt discrimination: I was paid less than a man and I was refused jobs because of my sex. I had many frustrating and funny experiences (not so funny at the time!) and I wrote about them in my book Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon.